The

Electric Hive

About Us

The Electric Hive is a hacker and programmer collective dedicated to mentoring budding programmers and producing technological solutions for public good. We are a charitable, volunteer-run organization and are in the process of applying for nonprofit (501c3) status in the United States. All of our community offerings are provided free, both in terms of liberty and cost.

Community

The world of programming can be lonely, difficult to penetrate, and confusing to navigate. We provide guidance and companionship for those traveling the programming road. Members of the Hive support one another in figuring out where to begin, where to go, and how to overcome coding obstacles and the occasional (or, sometimes, more than occasional) bouts of procrastination.

Who We Are

We strive to be an inclusive, welcoming, and helpful community, and we invite anyone of a like mind to join us. We include young people, old people, complete newbies, wizard hackers, PhD holders, self-taught coders, and everyone in between. If you are a person who likes other people and wants to program, you belong with us!

If you’re new and would like to join us and start your path in programming, if you are experienced and would like to help others in their journey, or if you just like the idea of our community, please join us!

How to Join Us

Zulip

Our community is primarily gathered in Zulip, a group chat application similar to - but better than - Slack. Zulip features excellent conversation threading and is free and open source (FOSS) software. The Zulip team has been extremely kind to provide us with a premium Cloud account free-of-charge due to the nonprofit and FOSS-focused nature of our organization, which would otherwise have been prohibitively expensive. Thank you to the Zulip team - y'all rock!

You can join our Zulip chat here.

Discord

You can join us on Discord, which is a secondary gathering place for our community. Our Discord server is less active than Zulip, but is in the process of being built up.

You can join our Discord server here.

Events & Webinars

We host online events like webinars and interviews with programmers, software engineers, and other people working in the field of technology. Our events are open to all and free. You can subscribe to our Google Calendar to see upcoming events, or check out our #hive stream on Zulip.

Our calendar can also be seen embedded here:

You can also access our calendar without logging in to Google here.

Reddit

If you are a Reddit user, you can join our subreddit on r/ElectricHiveHackers.

Learning & Education

We help community members learn and grow as programmers, and produce programming and technology-related educational materials.

The Waggle Dance

The Waggle Dance is a guide to learning programming produced and maintained by Hive members. You can access the guide here.

Learning How to Learn Programming

Here is a video created by our community entitled "Learning How to Learn Programming":



Mentoring

One of our primary missions is to mentor budding programmers, and we pursue this mission by running an active mentorship program. Our mentorship program is primarily built around 1-on-1 pairings of mentors and mentees, with text chats for most short conversations and questions, and then recurring 1-on-1 live meetings every 1 to 4 weeks, depending on the particular needs of the mentees.

If you want to be a mentee, no prior experience is required! If you want to be a mentor, we typically recommend that you have at least a year's worth of active programming experience.

We invite anyone who's interested to apply for the program by filling out the appropriate forms below. We accept both mentees and mentors on a rolling admission basis.

  • If you want to be a mentee (i.e. someone who wants help to learn programming), please fill out the mentee application.
  • If you want to be mentor (i.e. someone who wants to help others learn programming), please fill out the mentor application.

Why become a Hive mentee?

For mentees, we offer, among other things:

  • pairing with experienced mentors who can help guide your skill and career development
  • an active, friendly community to develop with
  • members with a wide range of skill levels, from complete novices to highly-experienced developers
  • a fairly extensive collection of learning resources
  • a job/coding interview training area, with learning and practice resources

Why become a Hive mentor?

There are a few major benefits of mentoring through the Hive rather than going it alone for potential mentors:

  • Our mentorship program is organized and established, with infrastructure & tooling in place for fundamental needs like communication (text, voice, and video), scheduling, and web hosting.
  • We have a system for mentorship that has been built over years of experience, including a mentee & mentor intake/application process, reminders of regular check-ins, and practices for reducing drop-outs and absenteeism.
  • We have a number of mentors available, which reduces the burden of work on any given mentor to answer a specific question at a specific time, and makes things like providing coverage for one mentor to take a break or vacation possible.
  • We actively collect and distribute teaching/learning resources for mentors and mentees.

Free and open source projects

We are a free and open source software (FOSS)-focused community. If you would like to help pitch in on a FOSS project, or want to recruit helping hands for a FOSS project you maintain, please join our Zulip and reach out on the #team-up stream!