It Takes Two to Tango: Tuitt Coding Bootcamp and freeCodeCamp.Manila Meetup

The Partnership

freeCodeCamp.Manila at Tuitt Coding Bootcamp headquarters.

The audacious goal of Tuitt Coding Bootcamp is to help career-shifters fulfill their dreams of becoming a professional web developer.  The bootcamp is always looking for passionate individuals to provide them the opportunity and venue to learn how to learn and validate their skills to become self-sufficient web developers.

Big things have small beginnings.

— Anonymous

Meanwhile, there is an existing community of self-taught, self-driven career-shifters dedicated enough to take the risk of doing the transition using an online platform for full-stack web development, namely freeCodeCamp.org. And they do have a local group here in Metro Manila — the freeCodeCamp.Manila.

Having an aligned mindset towards learning and education using the available open source technologies, the two parties — Tuitt Coding Bootcamp and freeCodeCamp.Manila — came up with an agreement to conduct a meetup of like-minded people or career-shifting web developers. The venue was hosted by the former and the event was prepared by the latter.

The Event

Miss Angeli (Web Developer) getting ready for the meetup.
Attendees who signed-up for the event.
The awesome welcome message.

First thing in the morning, we gathered some information from the attendees and directed them to the lab room to settle down and get comfortable before the event.

Getting to Know
Rem (JavaScript Developer/Community Leader) kicking-off the ritual to get to know the attendees — new ones and regulars.

The freeCodeCamp.Manila community integrates this “getting to know” section in every meetup that they hold in order to break the ice among the attendees and create an environment of openness towards each other.

Each and every attendee is given an ample amount of time to take the center stage and introduce themselves to the community. This allows the community to know the background of the attendees and create an alignment with the group.

Developer’s Stories
The master hacker of the day — Joselie, JavaScript Developer (Independent)/Community Leader.

A legitimate career-shifter, Joselie spearheaded the main event of the meetup — the grouphack event. He is an independent JavaScript developer right now and at the same time a dedicated community leader of the freeCodeCamp.Manila community. And he loves teaching.

Let’s get it on!

The attendees got ready for the whole-day event by introducing themselves to the community members who attended the meetup at Tuitt Coding Bootcamp’s headquarters at Timog Avenue, Quezon City.

The GroupHack Event
Server-side rendering in practice.

The grouphack application — made with JavaScript, React, Node/Express — for that meetup was created by Joselie, who invested roughly one-week of his spare time in making this CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete) demo application for the community free-of-charge.

Big-ass display of codes.

The attendees never tried creating a web app using the stack of technologies presented here on the grouphack but together they were able to make the app work and completed the CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete) functionalities.

This Is Just The Start

Appreciating the small blessings of life.

The Tuitt Coding Bootcamp provided the freeCodeCamp.Manila community a humble free lunch, on top of sponsoring the venue. It was well appreciated by the group because this is the first time that a meetup host gave them something, aside from programming, to share together.

“If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.”

― Jodi Picoult, Small Great Things

This meetup was regarded as one of the many successful meetups held this year by the community. This is not the only connection already established by both parties. freeCodeCamp.Manila community gives back to Tuitt Coding bootcamp by providing some guidance and some insights to the bootcampers, who where planning to do a career-shift themselves, through keynote speeches. Two of the community leaders — Philip and Rem — already shared their success and failures before landing a web developer career.

This is the last meetup scheduled by the community for the year 2017. For the new year just around the corner, the bond created will be strengthened by additional partnerships to host more events that will benefit freeCodeCamp, Tuitt Coding Bootcamp, career-shifters, and aspiring web developers.

Join us in the next meetups in 2018!