Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

Get involved in what; where?

Unspecific suggestions like this are the reason people get lost and resume the attitude you're deriding.

Blue Ridge Labs @ Robinhood.

We have a yearly, paid, 5 month long fellowship in Brooklyn for mid-career engineers, designs, and product managers that combines human centered design and Lean Startup to build tech ventures that fight poverty.

https://joinpropel.com came out of our fellowship and just raised a seed round from Andreesen Horowitz.

Our website: https://labs.robinhood.org

That is an exercise left to the reader. Find groups that interest you and are effective in their mission. Ask how you can help and follow through with your commitments. Be humble and aware that initially you will be taking not giving as they expend resources to spin you up.

Or as mentioned above - just donate some of that sweet, sweet cash that tech workers are making hand over fist compared to nearly every other occupation.

> Unspecific suggestions like this are the reason people get lost and resume the attitude you're deriding.

Yes, surely those people bear no responsibility around their personal level of civic engagement.

I've volunteered technology skills for a long time for social and community causes. Tech assistance ends up often starting as a secondary way to assist and first beginning with non-tech volunteering as a way to learn about problems. It's interesting how much more we can get done if a social enterprise/cause had the right tools and I invariably end up helping with something if I just get involved as a volunteer.

There's some important things that can make a lasting difference, beginning with ensuring there's something you care about, possibly obscure, but important, for possibly a long time. A big part of this is learning about what the issues are and their impacts.

To help pick a problem or area you care about.. there are things that you are naturally drawn to and can't help yourself with.

It's not a bad place to start looking for problems (and other people trying to make a difference) you care about and want to add value to is an important consideration.

Why? The most important thing I experience is the importance of always adding value first, and finding a way to do it. It simply opens more doors and opportunities than anything else I've ever experienced.

From a tech perspective, many social enterprises, groups can benefit from basic mobile apps or tools for the people they work with. The skillset here isn't the hard thing to find, it's a willingness to learn and only then solve problems even if they aren't new or interesting but deliver great value.

If you can help someone save a few hours a week with 10-15 minutes of making an excel sheet, it is a greater help and a start.

All big problems begin as and consist of a lot of smaller problems.

A secret of finding interesting projects that can grow, is that the willingness to solve small problems, because small problems leads to large problems on their own. Almost all of my multi-industry experience is due to the transferability of solving similar problems.

With this in mind, social good can happen independently, with a group, from an initiative at work, and not just exclusively from working with non-profits. Help where no one's helping and you'll find lots of opportunities to add value.

You should check out Popcode! (https://github.com/popcodeorg/popcode). It’s is a free OSS online IDE used by https://scripted.org to help kids in under-resourced high schools learn HTML/CSS/JS.

The big focus is helping students identify and fix mistakes in their code in a friendly and approachable manner.