Hi, I'm Thom Lamb, I created WillowHQ to solve two problems.
- I had a lot of stuff I wanted to make, but I have a full-time job as an engineer, and I didn't want to do all of it myself.
- I also love teaching and mentoring, and I wanted to help newer developers get practical experience building applications that are actually used by, hopefully, lots of people.
So I set this up, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, to solve both of those problems.
The big idea here is that myself or anyone else that wants to, sets up an initial app, and lays out some key features they want that app to have. Then using the issue tracker, we ask for submissions, and offer guidance in helping others figure out how to solve it. Submissions are made using a Pull Request, and that is how we vet and mentor people on the code they have writen. I will also of course discuss how to solve Issues in the Issue tracker for the project. The first such repo is RetroBoard which is a project to make a better retro board.
Please follow the following GitFlow to contribute to the retro project.
Glad you asked ! A retro is part of the agile software development process, where the team comes together to discuss things that went well, and things they could improve for the next Sprint ( a one or two week period of work). When this process is invigilated remotely, companies use a Board to add comments and vote on them, then they take those and turn them into actionable next steps.
There sure are ! And they work fine. But I wanted to be able to build my own, because the most popular competitor charges money to export and save the boards. Plus I have some other ideas about how to integrate this and other project managment tools to help developers that work remote. Also I think I might be able to charge a bit of cash for premium features. And mostly it was just the first halfway decent idea I had while I was setting this up.
Nope ! I'm hopeful that some of these ideas might be viable businesses at some point, but I already have a full time job and I'm just doing this as a hobby because I like it. If it stops being fun then I'll stop doing it. I recommend you do the same. Also I hope that the value I and other experienced devs that might join can offer is to help teach concepts, that are immediately applicable to shipping actual code. Finally you can also show potential employers your work, since all of these projects will be public repos. Finally I plan to write and talk about Willow a fair bit, the ideas we discuss here, and the people that are involved. All good stuff !
For now I would recommend connecting with me on LinkedIn or submitting a question using the Issue Tracker, as we might use questions to flush out this page, or a FAQ page we add onto this site. We should probably start a newsletter at some point as well, and also I kind of want to do a podcast... Like I said I want to do a lot of things, which is why I need people to help out !