Since 2012, a friendly monster has helped workshop organizers plan and track their events. Bridge Troll is a Rails app that provides a single site for students and volunteers to RSVP for workshops, simplifies the task of creating class groupings for the workshop day, and provides follow up surveys afterwards. It started for RailsBridge, and now MobileBridge, GoBridge, ElmBridge, ElixiBridge and ScalaBridge are actively using it!
Bridge Troll is an open source project, which means its care and feeding have been a labor of love by over 80 contributors led by partners Travis Grathwell and Lillie Chilen. Travis has been the lead on development with over 60% of the commits to the codebase, while Lillie has led the feature definition and adoption efforts. Together they’ve shepherded Bridge Troll from a simple database front-end to a full-fledged application that has helped Bridge Foundry analyze the success of our mission.
Now Lillie and Travis are taking a well-earned step back from Bridge Troll and looking for volunteers to take the lead.
On the coding side, this is a great opportunity for experienced developers who want to build the leadership skills needed for managing a development team. In addition to guiding the architecture of the Bridge Troll app, development leads maintain code quality and mentor more junior developers.
On the product design and evangelism side, there are multiple hats to wear. Lillie is currently filling three key roles: prioritizing and specifying new features, reaching out to Bridge Foundry chapters to help with adoption and providing administration and guidance for new workshop organizers using Bridge Troll while also helping them understand what makes a great Bridge workshop.
Interested? Know someone who would be great at continuing to care for and grow Bridge Troll, it’s easy to help:
- Drop a note to drop a note to ilen@bridgefoundry.org saying you’d like to help.
- Just go here and pick something from our “Help Wanted” issues work on:
https://github.com/railsbridge/bridge_troll/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22Help+Wanted%22
Want to help with product design? Pick an item in the Help Wanted list and clarify it so that developers can start work. If you need context, the staging environment is a safe place to explore the app: https://bridgetroll-staging.herokuapp.com/
Want to help with development? Start addressing one of the “Help Wanted” issues in the list above and submit a pull request. (Don’t forget to write tests!)
Want to help with something else? Get in touch! ilen@bridgefoundry.com
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