Doing Charity work

Recently I’ve found that my work environment sometimes makes me very apathetic, or maybe it’s because I was predisposed to that to begin with. But recently I found myself wanting to do something to help out those who aren’t so privileged (more thoughts on this maybe another time). For the most part, I don’t have too much experience in terms of volunteering, or doing stuff for free. For the past couple years, my work has been sponsoring a weekend hackathon for non profits in NZ, called Impact NPO.

I don’t really have a point for this post except to say that doing a hackathon for non profits showed me how a weekend of relatively simple work can mean a lot. Most non profits all have relatively simple requirements:

• a website to display their cause
• donation feature

To somebody who works as a software engineer, this work is usually a bit out of the norm, which is refreshing.

Learning different skills

To me, the most enjoyable part about the weekend apart from helping out a charity, is the ability to work within a completely different team. I think that everybody is able to learn something from an experience like that, where you spend a weekend working together towards something. It’s a bit like doing group projects from when you’re in school, except it’s like the real world version. People naturally arise to the occasion to fill the roles required. Working within a startup capability, you sometimes forget about how with new or different people. I really enjoyed this aspect and learned lots about how to work and get up to speed with new people quickly and efficiently.