Looking for an opportunity to work with a team to build an impactful product? Or perhaps a project that won't simply end up in your GitHub graveyard, never to be touched again? Hack4Impact will be the perfect place to hone and grow your programming skills and learn to work within a development team. You will learn to build software for users, not just to get an A in a class! You will work with real people on real problems.

Why · What you will be doing · What you should have · How to apply

Why

1. Utilize your skills for good. We are all privileged to have a premier education at U of I, and it is our obligation to use these learned skills to give back to our communities.
2. Not just a group project. We've all worked on a group project where 1 or 2 of your teammates didn't do anything at all. It sucks. At Hack4Impact, you have the chance to work with fully dedicated teammates who are passionate about the work we do. The non-profit organizations trust us, and we take this responsibility very seriously. We strive to deliver the best user-centric product.
3. Join a tight-knit community. We are a small group of students with high aspirations and a passion for making a positive impact in the world. Our internal community has been referred to by members as a family where people are free to discuss everything from their academics to their personal life.
4. Tackle interesting problems. Our clients often have a diverse set of problems, and we work with each of them to figure out the best customized solution to build. Our project leads and directors spend multiple weeks understanding their organization and whether we are tackling the right problems. Thus, we have different teams that encompass a variety of interests including mobile development, web development, and data projects! Check out uiuc.hack4impact.org/projects for some of our previous projects.

👀 Our Mission

Unite students to build well-engineered, user-centric, and impactful products for social change.

Hack4Impact believes in using tech for good. We believe in technology’s huge potential to empower activists and humanitarians to create lasting and impactful social change. We connect student software developers with nonprofits and other socially responsible businesses to develop powerful new tools for social change, enabling them to further their mission and better engage their clients. We work to foster a tight-knit community of dedicated students collaborating together to build a better society and to make technology more accessible and inclusive to underserved communities.

🛠 What you will be doing

Software developers constitute the majority of a Hack4Impact team and code together to make the product come to life. Software developers don't only program though; they also participate in many user experience and product decisions.

• You'll be brainstorming with product managers and product designers to conceptualize and build new features
• You'll be participating in discussions of technical architecture
• You'll be owning specific features of the product, creating your own issues, pull requests, and reviewing other developers' code
• You’ll improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes

Our tech stacks this past semester included React & Redux, Python/Flask, PostgreSQL along with GraphQL, MongoDB, and Relay. We've built mobile applications using React Native and have done work writing ML models as well.

🤓 What you should have

• You are a student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
• You have at least three semesters left at UIUC (including Fall 2023).