Last year, I mentored a few students who are learning coding to become a software engineer from non-traditional backgrounds. Rather than encouraging them to leetcode and practice for interviews, I taught them software engineering practices and mentored them to build c0d3.com together as a team. c0d3.com will be a free learning site where other students like them can learn coding and then help improve the site. As a senior engineer, I made sure to not write any code myself and focused on helping them with code reviews, architecture questions, and holding sprint meetings every Monday at 9:30pm. We document our daily sprint updates here: <a href="https://github.com/garageScript/c0d3-app/wiki/Sprint-H1-2020" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/garageScript/c0d3-app/wiki/Sprint-H1-2020</a><p>To get beta users for our app, we started a free coding group at our local libraries and got a few dozen active users: <a href="https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3/" rel="nofollow">https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3/</a><p>I am pretty happy with the outcome and the code quality. The students wrote unit tests with every pull request, listened to feedback, and achieved 100% code coverage in the codebase. Now, after some user feedback and iterations we are ready to give a preview of what we worked on. Any feature suggestions / feedback will become learning opportunities for the next generation of students.<p>Last month, a rec opened up on my team and I was able to hire one of these students. If I could hire all of them, I would. If anyone here is hiring, please consider hiring these awesome students who worked hard to make c0d3.com possible (I've listed their code contributions and linkedIn profiles): <a href="https://github.com/garageScript/c0d3-app/wiki" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/garageScript/c0d3-app/wiki</a>