Problem
Two shortages sit next to each other and never meet. Students who can already code have nowhere to write software that someone depends on — internships are scarce, and building alone teaches you nothing about working in a team. Meanwhile youth NGOs, education nonprofits, cooperatives, and community groups need software they cannot afford to commission.
Bootcamps answer the first shortage with invented projects. A toy project teaches syntax and nothing about the part that is actually hard: scope, deadlines, and a client who will use the thing.
Why I built it
Because the missing ingredient on both sides is the same one — a real deadline owned by a real organization. Once you put that in the middle, the student gets experience that counts and the organization gets working software. Neither side needs charity; they need matching.
Bootcamps hand out toy projects. We hand you an organization with a real deadline.
Solution
Ten fellows per cohort — five from Türkiye, five international — split into two teams of five. Each team is paired with one organization for ten weeks and ships open-source software with the repo and documentation handed over at the end.
Three volunteer mentors run weekly office hours. The organization commits roughly one hour a week, which is deliberate: the program fails the moment it becomes work for the partner instead of relief.
How it works
The ten weeks are shaped around one constraint — build time is only four to five weeks, so everything else has to protect it.
- Onboarding and pairing at the start.
- Scope locked by week three.
- A week 5 checkpoint that exists to cut scope, not review it.
- Demo day at the end, with the repository transferred.
The money
The cohort budget is $4,000. $2,500 of it — two thirds — goes directly to fellow stipends; the rest covers program management and operations. Partner organizations pay $2,000 for a team of five, which makes the program self-supporting rather than dependent on a sponsor's mood.
Outcome
- Cohort structure and 10-week timeline defined end to end.
- Budget split across stipends, management, and operations.
- Public site live for sponsor and partner outreach.
Learnings
A program is a product. The site is not the marketing for it; the site is where the program becomes legible enough for a sponsor to say yes — and legible enough for a fellow to know what they are signing up for.