About the Website Development Team

• The Hack for LA Website Development Team is a level 1 team, which means the team has a support structure in place for all developers on the team to learn best practices before moving on to a level 2 team. In addition, this means all developers new to the team go through the same process.

• Our front end is HTML, SCSS, and JavaScript. Our back end and development operations use GitHub Actions and Google Apps Script.

Once you join our team, we expect all developers to do the following:

• Require a time commitment of at least 6 hours per week, excluding vacations and weeks off.

  • Also, please let the tech leadership team know (through a Slack message in the hfla-site channel as well as an @ mention in a comment of the issue that you would be working on) if you are planning to take a week off or a longer vacation.

• Attend at least one of the following meetings each week:

  • All team weekly meeting (UX/UR, Development, Product), Sundays 10am-12 noon Pacific Time
  • Developer (front-end/back-end) weekly team meeting, Tuesdays 7-8 pm Pacific Time
  • (Optional) Developer Office Hours meeting, Thursdays 7-8pm Pacific Time

  In case, you are unable in any given week, you should reach out to the tech leadership team. Exceptions to this requirement may be provided on a case-by-case basis.

• Complete a pre-work developer checklist issue, which we will guide you through.

• Review pull requests, which we will teach you how to do.

• Work on one issue at a time and wait until your pull request is merged before working on another issue.

• Progress through issues with increasing complexity in the following order:

  • Good first issue Number 1 (our way of seeing if your dev env is setup)*
  • Good first issue Number 2 (our way of catching the most common branching mistakes)*
  • Small
  • Medium
  • Large

  The reasons for this progression are:

  • The issues start out as being prescriptive and become less so as you gain more experience by working through increasingly complex issues.
  • We are trying to teach you the team methodology through the issues themselves.
  • It ensures you understand what we expect and the quality of contributions.

• Also, please only do two good first issues, one small issue, one medium issue, then move on to large and extra large issues*.

  • This will ensure we have enough good first, and small issues for newer developers to work on.*
  • Exceptions may be made for working on more than one small issue during the entirety of your time on the website team but please speak with a team lead with your reason for doing so, such as a medium issue being too difficult for you and you need to learn something new by doing a small issue as a stepping stone to help you progress to a medium issue.

*additions after the wiki was moved.