21 Python Powered Mentorship with Ray Berg
This episode features [Ray Berg](https://twitter.com/raymondberg), Software Developer at Braintree and Organizer for the [Chicago Python Users Group (Chipy)](http://www.chipy.org/). Ray runs a free mentorship program through that community that allows folks to power up their skills using the Python ecosystem. We'll learn about how to be better mentors and mentees and about how that program operates.<br><br>### Resources and Shoutouts:<br>- [Chipy](http://www.chipy.org/)<br>- [Chipy Mentorship](https://chipymentor.org/)<br><br>##### Music Credit: [Tumbleweeds by Monkey Warhol](http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Monkey_Warhol/Lonely_Hearts_Challenge/Monkey_Warhol_-_Tumbleweeds)
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Transcript
Hello. I'm Ryan Cook, and this is Civic Tech Chat, a podcast about the civic technology movement. We seek to harness the power technology has to improve the delivery of public services to people everywhere. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Civic Tech Chat. You've now made it with us to episode 21. When you have a moment here, I do have an ask of you. Please, if you've enjoyed our content, head on over to that Apple Podcast app and leave us a five star review. Doing so helps make it so that I can keep making this high quality content that you civic tech fanatics crave. Now this week, we're gonna be talking with Ray Berg, software developer with Braintree and an organizer in the Chicago Python users group, also known as Chippy. Now Chippy runs a program called the Chippy Mentorship Program. What this is is a free mentorship program that spans thirteen weeks that lets folks out here in our community level up their tech skills in order to do things like help with projects, be they at work, in their community, or simply those that are meant for learning. And we'll talk about this a whole lot more in the interview. So without further ado, let's go ahead and hop right in.
Ray, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to be on Civic Tech Chat this week. If you could, introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do.
Sure. My name is Ray Berg, and I am a developer. I work at Chicago, predominantly for a a financial company. And, I am I guess, the reason I'm here today is because I'm the, one of the directors of the Chippy Mentorship Program or the Chicago Python Users Group mentorship
Nice. And what would you say is your personal why? What what drives you to get out of bed each day and and do all those activities?
I think, for me, it's it's always about sort of leaving an impact and coming back. At the end of life, I wanna look back and say, alright. That's I touched a little bit here. Right? I was able to make a little fun print in the world and, the Shipyard Ministry program and my work is, has has been helpful in making me feel like maybe that might be true someday.
I'm getting a sense that, like, that idea of contribution is something that is, like, really important,
to you personally. Is am I hearing correctly there? Yeah. I think both in terms of my own and and in terms of how other people are allowed to contribute in spaces is a very sort of a a core part of how I define myself and where I try to drive others to be. I think, the more we can enable folks to be empowered and to be contributing and to be participating in whatever solutions they've got ahead of them is solutions they've got ahead of them is is pretty fantastic. So
Now before we get into the, I guess, the substance of what we're gonna talk about today, I did have a little bit of a non sequitur question to ask you. I found out that you had a ranking list of Super Smash Brothers characters as far as, like, preference for playing them, I believe was the angle. Is is that correct?
You are quite right. Yeah. That's on my website. I I have very few things on that website, but I do have a list of lists, and that's one of the lists.
Now I I I have to ask the about that. But, like, what's the what's the methodology for how you made your choices? And, I guess, could you give us, like, what are the top three three characters there? Oh, it's great. If you remember. I you know, I actually don't remember. One of the things about those lists is that they are, sort of a great way to take a,
a strong stance on stuff that doesn't matter at all. And, and I think with that one specifically, that was probably the most data driven one. I remember making a small Python script that would do head to head rankings for these I don't remember how many, 64 characters, whatever that exists in the game. And, it was to settle an argument we had in the office because one of the things we like to do to blow off steam is play Super Smash Brothers at lunch and after work. So, yeah. I created the official authoritative list of the best Super Smash Brothers characters in order.
Now I think I think that's a pretty unique application of Python there to, to cause a data driven decision
a Smash Brothers characters. That's pretty fantastic. I'm just glad to be leading in my field.
So I guess, getting to that kind of, like, that that thought leadership and that kind of journey, type stuff that we're getting into there, how is the concept of mentorship, I think we're gonna be talking about a lot in this episode, played a role in in your own career journey?
Yeah. So I I think throughout my life, I've had a lot of good teachers around me and a lot of people that empowered me to to do both to to be a contributor in in, my life and also to, help drive others and help, to educate. So when I was, in college, I actually started off as a music ed teacher, my major. And I also did computer science. And after a while, I realized I was a really terrible musician. And I said, oh, well, it just so happens this other career will pay more as well, and I will leave the, music to people who can play better than I can. And that's sort of where I I headed off. And for me, mentorship in, like, in the professional capacity has always been driven by folks that have been in the industry for a while. I had a a boss who I I I love very much. It was in the government when I worked there, who who sort of embodied this. But people who are in a position of power or authority or people who are just a little bit ahead of somebody behind them who are see the contributions back to that person, to the next person in line. Right? The next person that's gonna be able to have a shot, just view that as not only a part of their job, but, like, a core mission of their job is to be able to hand that off to somebody else. Your role isn't to be great by yourself. It's to be help others be great after you.
So a a follow-up to that that I have to ask, what what instrument was it that you were Well thinking of diving into there?
The one I love the most was marimba. I was a marimba xylophonist, but, quite, again, quite bad. I can't can't emphasize that
enough. So did you still play at all? Is that is that a hobby? I play piano,
and percussion from time to time, but, I keep it for mostly noodling around and stress relief. Still very good today.
And continuing on that theme of of that mentor mentee relationship, are there things that you experienced from from mentors that you would suggest to people maybe in, like, the form of advice for folks that are coming and saying, like, I wanna be a better mentor or I wanna be a better mentee even?
Yeah. I think for mentors who are looking to improve, I I find that the the advice I'm giving more often than than not is just remember that they are not you. Usually, people can get wrapped up in sort of the things that they wanna learn the most. And they say, oh, it's really interesting if you if you think about this application or you think about this application. Or maybe try thinking about it in this way, and they don't take the time to sort of step back and say, where is this person at? Where what is their trajectory? Trajectory? I think everybody isn't just a it they're not just a point. Right? They're a point with a velocity. They're a they're a ray to to borrow the term. But they're they're a point and they're and they're going in a direction. Right? And if even if they're going in the wrong direction, you need to understand what the direction is when they start out. So if I'm at coordinate one one, right, on this the old Cartesian plane, and I'm going up into the right. If I if I realize, oh, man, I really need to get this back down to the lord, like, somewhere else. I need just to recognize where that person is, where they're moving, and then try to get them either course corrected or see if I am maybe misunderstanding why they're moving where they're at. So just understanding that. Understanding where people are, where they're trying to get to, and let them guide the way that they need help before you step in and say, oh, no. No. No. You're doing it wrong. You know? I think it's a pretty easy skill to apply, but it is hard to recognize that you're not doing it. It's something that you need to be very practical and practiced and intentional about when you think about what what am I teaching? What am I trying to teach? And similarly with mentees or people who are trying to learn more, I I feel like it's very easy to get wrapped up in in, like, leaping from whatever branch is available to the next one. And you're looking and saying, I really wanna learn Python. Okay. Great. What tutorial? Well, somebody said this thing, and so I should learn this thing, and then I should learn that thing, and then somebody said I should learn this. And you can get kind of lost in that struggle. And working with somebody and finding a mentor and talking to people, not just about how do you get better at your skills, but where are you going? Like, what path are you on? What things do are you open to learning along the way? What things are do you want to learn, and where are you going is is pretty key to being a successful mentee. And if you're not working toward the goals that you have for yourself, you're probably not gonna wind up in a place that's very sustainable.
It's I'm hearing from you that one of the things from the mentee's perspective in order to be successful is, I guess, having some understanding of, like, why am I doing this?
Am I hearing you correctly with that? Yeah. Yeah. What what projects are driving me? What area of work is interesting to me? What things do I care about? One of the big things that we look for in our program when we're talking about candidates and whether they do well or not is, are they interested in something? Do they have a place that they're trying to get? And if they aren't, they they just they wanna be better, like, a little bit better. That's not bad, but the people who are truly successful are, I wanna get better at this because I wanna be able to write better Python because I wanna have a job as a as a programmer. Or I wanna write
better Python because I want to figure out an application in my life. I wanna be able to, like, save myself time in building Excel sheets and things like that. Let's, talk a little bit about the organization that you you mentioned at the very beginning here that, you are helping lead. That's the Chicago Python users group or Chippy for short. Could you tell us, a little bit, like, at the high level, like, what is Chippy? What what what does it do? Yeah. Chippy is an organization that is was founded about fourteen years ago, I think.
It is a, it is a true users group. It is driven by its user base. We have a board of, I guess, of organizers that, work together, about nine of us, I think. Each of us sort of have a different area of of control, and we work on different aspects of building a successful community around Python here in Chicago. So I think it's one of the most active and and definitely one of the largest in the city. It's also one of the largest in the country. And definitely one of the largest in the city. It's also one of the largest in the country. There's a few others that are are larger. But, the whole point of the organization is can we put on educational programming? Can we put resources in front of folks? Can we connect jobs, job seekers givers, I guess? Ed, can we, connect sponsors with folks that need to, like, eat a a meal after a long day in the office and still wanna learn a little bit about Python?
And, yourself, how did you wind up being involved with Chippy?
I think I attended, you know, a while back. I hit up a couple of meetups and I started attending. I think it was probably three, four years ago at this point. But I just started attending because I I saw some interesting talks come up. I saw a couple of people who were working at companies that I was interested in working at, there. And I started having conversations with people, and I realized that there's some pretty cool things happening. One of the first things I saw was the first, mentorship program offering. And I was like, oh, this is really neat. And then the second term, I volunteered to be a mentor and then did it again. And then, after that, I took over the program and went from there. So it was kind of a slow growth into being a part of the organization. And I didn't join the board even until after I, was on the the mentorship team for a while.
The mentorship, program that you're bringing up there, could you give us, I guess, like, what the what what would the elevator pitch for that be? Like, what's the the high level and and, like, why, why does it exist?
Yeah. So it's a it's a thirteen week one on one free program, all volunteer. The idea is to connect a learner with somebody who is willing to coach them through various levels of Pythonness. Right? If somebody's coming in with no Python experience or they've done some basic work, they need somewhere to go, or somebody who's a web dev person or somebody who's trying to do, DevOps systems, automation stuff, or if they're trying to do data science or they're trying to do anything. How do we take somebody who needs a little help, somebody who's willing to give a little help, merge them together, and then watch them grow over thirteen weeks? It's coupled with one on one meetings predominantly and then about five check-in points. But it's a really great program. It's totally free, and it's all volunteer.
And then are there, like, particular focus areas that the program tries to find people that are, like, interested in these, like, types of silos? Or is it pretty much
much We tend to drift into the silos of of core Python and web dev and data science. Those are the tend to be the three that people, self group in. But I think people it sort of hides the the complications that live there. Almost every single data scientist needs to have some platform for sharing their their results. So a lot of times, they're doing web development work. A lot of the web development folks need to understand how to provision, cloud infrastructure to deploy their their projects. So they how do we how do I operate operationalize my thing that I have running locally? So they start to get into the DevOps world and the Ansible world where they're trying to deploy cool new tools and things like that. And then the core Python folks, all of a sudden, they they can catch a niche and they say, woah. This is really neat. And they can deep dive onto some complicated stuff in any of those areas, whether it be, I'm doing this a little bit of work and, oh, I found this really cool simulation tool that can do machine learning or other applications. Or I, you know, I found this new area of interest that now I can apply to my job, and I'm gonna deep dive on that.
Now someone that's going into the program as an ment, how would you describe their average experience? Like, what what should their what should someone's expectations be going into the program? Like, what should they, well, not to reuse the word, but what should they expect to see? Mhmm.
I think the, I think it's it's pretty wide. So I like to try to to tell people if you're on one of two ends of the spectrum, it's probably not great. The one end is I have don't know what Python is. If you don't know what Python is, there's lots of cool resources to get started like Codecademy or, I guess, like, what Code Wars. Right? Like, a couple of the tools to help you get the basics of Python just syntax down. There's great books out there. I think there are good resources that you can leverage before you start to borrow somebody's time. On the other end of the spectrum, you have somebody who might be in a PhD program or trying to figure out a very specific application of Python into a, like, a track of maybe government. Right? Or they say, I have this specific problem, and I'm looking for a way to model this type of data these 15 ways. And at that point, I'm probably not gonna be able to find anybody for you. So in one case, you may be bottom end, you might be borrowing too much time from somebody where you haven't put in that leg work by yourself. On the other end, I can't find anybody that when you talk to them, you're not gonna get a a lot out of. You'll get something out of it, but you won't get as much as somebody who needs a little bit more help.
And speaking of, I guess, government applications or civic applications of this, do you do you consider this program, I guess, in in your view, to be to live and be in the space of civic technology? The the viewers can't see me air quoting right now. But, do like, is that something that you would consider this to live in?
I I think I it's an interesting question. I think I probably struggle with it. I would put us predominantly as an enabler of civic technology, and I think that comes from the idea that we're we're trying to democratize access to Python as a programming language, as a platform for technological development. So if if you look at what we're building, we're building people. Like, we're building people who happen to be citizens of Chicago in this case, and those citizens have varied interests. Almost every year, we have somebody who's interested in doing analysis on CTA data almost every year. Yes. It's a great dataset. It's so fascinating. And a lot of people in Chicago, experience it for lack of a better word. Right? So I think we we have a lot of applications. We have even beyond that, we've get people who are, you know, we've we've had folks from WBEZ be in the program. We've had folks from government be in the program. I think you, yourself have interviewed some folks that have come through the program. And and I there are people who are coming with all those different experiences and levels, but all of them are citizens. All of them should be and can be active. And I think what we try to instill is a basic set of technological technological skills centered around Python. And we try to, instill this idea that you can do it. Whatever it is, you can achieve that and that a network of people around you is great. And then possibly the last one, you need to do something. Right? We really try to push folks to be mentors if they've never been mentors before because you never know what's gonna happen. Right? You you you don't know when you give back, when you do this work, when it'll come out the other side. And for the new person coming in, especially in the civic tech space, if you suddenly get access to a few more skills, a few more tools, boy, I tell you, the whole world opens up. And that's a really cool, I guess, well, value proposition or whatever.
Yeah. For sure. And I I think that that that that drive, that message is is really powerful. I mean, as you mentioned, there there have been folks on this program that have, cited back to this program as being part of their impetus. I don't know if you've crossed paths with, Cyrus Sethna before, but, he he went through this program as well. And I believe, actually, he made a project that, had to do with, like, calculating the cost of meetings in government. Yep. So at the very least, you know, can hang your hat on that. I I guess that that would count as a, like, a civic technology programming project. Right? Absolutely. No. And and I think Cyrus, like, when I I remember his project and I remember
him sort of exploring the ideas of APIs and data design and how do you how do you get to that data and how do you expose that data back out to a user. And Python's a really cool platform for that kind of work. And it's really fast, and it's it's an instant feedback cycle. So the the kind of neat things that Cyrus was able to do, the automation things that we're helping to drive some of his the work that that was could be automatable so that he could focus on other things. That was really cool to see. And I do do think, you know, the the government was made better of just in that application of it, much less the the later work he went on to do.
Absolutely. And I have to admit that, it occurs to me in listening to the your prior answer that about this program that I think you may have also come up with, like, a pretty good, slogan for CTA. Or to give, folks context, that aren't in Chicago, it's the Chicago Transit Authority. Did I get that right? I believe so. Yeah. You know, CTA. You'll experience it.
Very true.
And, back to the mentorship program. So we talked a little bit about what the experience is like, why folks wanna get into it, what some of the benefits of it are. How do folks, one, signal their involvement or, like, they want to be involved in it, and two, how are the mentees chosen to participate in this program?
So we've sort of evolved this process over time, but now we have a new portal that, accepts applications and lets people build a mentorship profile sort of year round. It's available at chippy.org if you'd like to check it out. But, so we have this platform, and what it allows you to do is build a user profile, take a brief skills assessment, and then depending whether you wanna be a mentee or a mentor, you can choose that that track and say, okay. Let me explain more about what I'm looking for, what I wanna learn, or let me explain what kind of person I think I could help. And, we so we go through this process. We open up our applications for about two months every, term, which is half a year for us. The next term coming up would be December going into January, or the next, opening for the term. The term goes from January until, May. But, so we we have these, we have these application processes that people go through. And at the end result, we get this, you know, pretty rich in data application. We know who the person is. We know what their interests are. We know what they've done before. We know, what they're looking to do and and the help that they think they need. We know where they sort of would fit within a program like ours. And then we we have a a process that we've been developing more recently, but, I go through personally, my only role in the selection process. If anybody ever comes up to me and says, hey. Can I get into the program? I say, I can't help you literally at all. So and I it's it's by design. I don't wanna be able to help anybody in that specific sense. So I go through and I pull out all identifying information from each of the applications. So I hand review each one. I have some tools that will go out and remove, like, mostly gender, sexual identity, religion, nationality, country of origin, things like that. We remove that from the application process as well as things that might inspire people to say, oh, I like this person just because we both went to the University of Michigan or just because we both work at this company or this person works at a really cool place or this person works at this place. Somebody might say, I am a nurse at x y z hospital. And we try to, like, say, I'm a nurse. Right? We try to pull that process, or pull that that, information back, for our process. And then what we do is we hand that over to a set of anywhere between nine and fifteen reviewers. And one night we go through and we divide them up into three groups, and we we churn through them. We'd have them, force rank the the, applications desired list. Ranked order, who who gets led into the program in one order based on who we have available. So on those kind of basic tracks of core Python, web dev, and data science, we have a couple of lists, and we say, alright. The top 10 are from here to here in each list. Who who do we have now for mentors? We go into our mentor pool. We say, okay. We've got a really strong data science mentor. Let's look at our data science track, and let's see who's who's, like, the top candidate. Did have they good match now? It's they're not a great match. Let's see if we can find a like, another one that that would match ideally. So we basically work through those lists after the and it all anonymized to review and we choose our folks. When I took the program over as well, we, had it we wanted to grow it a little bit. So it was at 10 people, per, term, and we wanted to get up to about 20. But when we did that, we're like, let's be a little bit intentional about it. We would really like to expand underrepresented populations in tech. Because if we're gonna grow and do that extra work, we might as well focus on trying to to to fill a gap. And it's something we've we've cared about for a while. And and the mentorship program, I think, is a really great place for us to do it because we have a a increasingly diverse set of mentors that are coming in and helping to grow folks and then a very diverse, set of applicants, which has really been terrific over the past few years. So that's how we do it.
Yeah. It it sounds like through anonymizing the submissions, what you're trying to do is eliminate kind of those unfortunate human biases that can trickle up in a process like that. In your observation so far, has that has that been effective at trying to accomplish that mission you're you're you're talking about of trying to make sure that there is a diverse,
group that's coming through the program, something that's, you know, I guess, a representative of our community here. Yeah. I think we we still fall short of being truly representative of our community, and I think it's largely because we haven't figured out the advertising campaign as well. Most of us are technologists. Most of us are engineers, within Chippy and the Chicago Pipe and Users Group. I think the group could actually use a lot of folks that aren't technologists. Groups like Shy Hacknight here in Chicago, I think, really, excel because of their, sort of diverse backgrounds that come in and and work on the problems. You don't just see technologists. You don't just see engineers. You see program managers. You see, end user experience folks. You see boots on the ground volunteers. You see politicians. You see everybody, organizers. Right? And Python being a technology, like, a a language, centered group, it's a little bit less diverse because you sort of have to already know. I like Python to come in and to be a part of it. Even if there's a lot of stuff that might be applicable to you regardless of where you're coming at in life, even though the tools and the resources might be useful for you everywhere, it's still tough to break through that that that barrier. And so as a result, we're sort of a victim of who's already in the space. And so the gaps that we're we have recognized for years, are sort of what we're left left with for our, advertising and other things. We're trying to do better by that. We're trying to get a little bit more exposure in other communities, but I think, I think we're doing really well for what we've got so far. And any ideas are welcome.
So are there are there any, like, initiatives or tactics that you would be willing to give nod to that are things that, like, you're you're doing right now through the organization to try to to further that goal? Yeah. I think each we're trying to foster some relationships with other groups specifically crossing the gender divide. PyLadies has been really fantastic. Also a pie Python group here in Chicago.
They've been a really great advocate for women in our space and for, basically, non males trying to navigate the tech world in Chicago. And they're really inspirational for us for that that purpose. So working with them has been great to reach a whole new group of people, that traditionally, we haven't been able our our the signal we've been able to provide hasn't been that great. That's really cool. We've tried to, reach out through a few different nonprofits. I'm gonna fail to remember any of them at the last minute. But, but, basically, we're we're sort of reaching out through all the resources we have. And our group, as it becomes more exposed, all of a sudden, we realize it's a fractal problem. Right? It's it's we get somebody from a from a different community that's not been, like, not been a part of the core Python users group for a while, and all of a sudden, they come in with network connections and, folks elsewhere. So, just as our, as our mentees are becoming like, they're becoming staples and fixtures within the the Chicago Python community, from three years ago, you can look at mentees who now have become either organizers, or they're they're planning events, or they're leading activities.
Those folks are are now also driving our outreach efforts, which is really, really neat. Now if there's say some Civic Tech Chat fan out there that is is hearing this message and is like, like, oh, like, I am part of nonprofit x, and we could totally be a part of an outreach thing, and that would help drive this. What would be the best way for them to get in touch and say all of that? Oh, absolutely.
I think it it would be great. There's a right on the on the portal on, c h I p y dot org, you go to the mentorship section. On the bottom, we have a, like, a place to leave a comment. That email goes straight to the mentorship team, and we review and try to respond to them. They'll they'll always get to them right away because we're just a team of volunteers. But, yeah, we love hearing from those those groups. Not only just for, we've had a couple of people do this, elsewhere, but not just because they might have connections and resources and might be able to provide, like, visibility for the program, but, also, also, there's a lot of opportunities for people who are coming into the program who don't know what they wanna do yet. So the passion, the interest, the thing that we care about, it doesn't just it's not just magically there, especially with with early Python developers. Right? It's not like you say, ah, I wanna I wanna learn technology. I think I care about it. A lot of times people need to know what projects could look like. And so if if we could partner with charities and we we've done this a little bit. We found a few groups that are are willing to, to offer up sort of requirements. Usually, they come with a person. The person says, oh, I wanna join the program, and I I belong to this nonprofit, whether it's public art Chicago or something else. Right? So that group can come along with the requirements and say, oh, this project needs to get completed. Is there are there any mentees or any potential people that would be really interested in picking this project up? It'd be really fun to to sort of offer those up and say, hey. If you don't have anything yet and you really wanna learn Flask or you wanna learn some basic web technology, why not think about it in application to this company? Why not think about it in application to this service? We're looking to get a little bit more, project oriented in that way too as, like, just Chippy in general. How do we, do long term development on projects that serve the city or for nonprofits?
One thing I I believe I got the sense of, you know, listening to some of your, answer before is that there seems to be a dynamic of supply and demand with with the men the mentors. How does one become a mentor in the program? I guess, I guess through the portal as you mentioned. But, like, what sort of criteria are you looking for? And, is is that something where there's, like, there's always a drive for more mentors? Or is there a number we're trying to you try to target? How does that all work?
Yeah. It's a it is through the portal, but we tend to look for folks that we we've recognized in the community. It's kind of a it's a weird problem. Right? Because if you're setting up a mentorship program, it's there's sort of an implicit agreement that I say that this mentor is a really good mentor. And we haven't necessarily met all the mentors yet. And the demand is still like, the supply is still low enough that we have to be we're very open about, like, hey. If you wanna apply to be a mentor, you can be a mentor. I'd love to get to the place where we had 50 applications to be mentors because it is a prestigious thing. If you look at some of the mentors, that came through the program, when they put that on their resume and they go apply the jobs, the folks especially looking for senior developers are really that's a cool thing to see that you've been able to work with somebody that was brand new to the field or somebody that was a fledgling web developer or a new data scientist and be able to input like, put those skills in. That's so cool. So I'd love to get to the point where it it is as, like, rewarding to be selected as a mentor as it would be to be selected as a mentee. Right now, we usually get about four or five to one, applications. So if we get 20 to 25, mentors, we'll get a 125 applications for mentees. Yeah. And I I it's a good number because we get to be selective with our mentee selection or our mentee process. But, yeah. So we try to find we try to exclude people who sort of didn't take the application seriously to be a mentor or people that we don't necessarily know that much about yet. And and, we're always looking to to find new folks, but a lot of times we'll get people who've never met before and they turn out to be great mentors. Their application, they know what they're looking to to to work on, what they're willing to help with, and we could find them a pair and they they go they do great. And oftentimes, those are the folks that can be more involved and chippy in in our organization.
Very cool. And and, folks that are out there listening, if you are in the Chicago area and you think you might meet those criteria, I would highly suggest trying to participate. I can speak from some personal experience. It is a really rewarding thing to go through. Being able to kind of witness somebody having those moments, learning, growing, more meaningful experiences you'll have in your career. So definitely make sure you check it out. Now speaking of those projects and things that kinda go through, that's my understanding is it's a very project based program. Are there any, favorites that have come through the pipeline in in your exposure to this? Anything that sticks out to you?
So I I tend to like the projects that that really connect to somebody's work and and how they they function. We had somebody from, WBEZ who they had a they had this web page. And it's such a great story for me as a, like, a educator like person. I'm not an educator, but I get close sometimes. They they kept seeing this weird error and it said Flask. And something was breaking and they couldn't figure it out what and they had to go Google it all the time. And finally, they said, you know what? I just need to go learn Flask. I need to understand how this works. And maybe that will make me be better at fixing this problem when it comes up in the future. And so they came and they built a really cool web app that that did, like, image, presentation from the I think it was the National Archives. Might have been Library of Congress. I think it was Library of Congress actually. So they they did this giant, like, scrolling text. They they, like, learned Flask from scratch. They weren't had no experience, no background, and they said, hey. I'm gonna figure this out over thirteen weeks. And it's so cool to see that. The same, cadre, we had a person who was doing testing and, like, really had no idea how to do sort of, like, more automated, work, how to build a an app. And he had one of the greatest mentors we've had in the program was his mentor. I tell you, what he he was able to produce at the end of that thirteen weeks was incredible. I I don't think from from the sort of the the outside, it would look as incredible as it was. But to me, watching to see where they came from and where they got to, it was like, oh, that's so cool. We've had self driving cars. We've had, we've had CTA analysis, done at levels I've never seen done before. We see, Divvy ride sharing data. Like, we see all sorts of projects that are absolutely fantastic. And I but I think the ones that I gravitate toward are those ones that really impact my everyday is Cyrus's as an example. My everyday life. How the the work that I could be doing instead of doing this menial work or this this work that I don't like doing as much, which everybody has a part of that in their day to day. I love that
stuff. Ray, could could you talk to us a little bit about the organizing structure and maybe philosophy of the the program?
Oh, yeah. So the philosophy is something I've been really focused on for a while. When I took it over, it was it was, the first three offerings, and we were really growing. We were trying to figure out what it was gonna look like. And, Tee, this, is mister Tee in the in the Chippy program. Tee was the one who founded the program, and he really got us headed in the direction that we wanted to be going in. We figured out we liked the project nights, which are three events that we do during the the mentorship program to get people together. Actually, the the day that we're interviewing this, or doing the interview, we're gonna about to have a project night tonight, and it's gonna be a lot of fun. Our second of the fall term here. So he sort of set the direction of where we wanted to be. And then when I came in, we we tried to figure out, okay, what does this look like when when spread out and done with sustainability in mind? What does it do look like when we try to build up this program, to to be here for the long haul? So the first thing I did was try to look around and see who is gonna be around to help me out to build a senior mentorship pool. So, a friend, Hannah Lee and Patrick Moland came in and were were the first two people to help me sort of, look for sponsors and, reach out to different organizations and, start to build up a little bit of a rep for ourselves, to do publicity, to manage the program itself, to do grading, things like that. So we try to spread it out. Hannah, since left, and, Zach Rosenberg has taken her spot. Taken her spot. So we still have a team of three. And we're, you know, trying to figure out what it looks like as a as a to to plan this stuff, to have weekly meetings where we're talking through what things need to be resolved that week, what things need to be delivered, feature enhancements for the website that we're building, right, the portal, what things can we be working on that push the program forward. And I feel like the way that we've organized has really set us up for success. Because each of us even though some of us need to back off a little bit, life gets in the way, get a little bit of stress, a little bit of pressure, gotta take some time off, somebody gets married, moves into a new house, that kind of thing. The other two step up and they can really take the program over. So that model has worked really well for us, and the sort of the goal is that this program will go on regardless of who's in charge of it, who runs it, who are the the the individual components. How do we bring up especially good mentors to become great leaders of the program.
Yeah. It sounds like that you you have a goal to build something that's lasting, beyond the the core group.
Yeah. And I for me, it's even beyond Chicago. We are really trying to figure out how how do we export this model. So I wanna export it out of my brain and Tee's brain into our organization as a whole. And then beyond that point, we wanna figure out how do we get others, other states, other cities to take this on. We actually talked recently with Datamate as they were building their, new mentorship program and give them some of our learned the lessons learned over this time. We've talked to folks in Tennessee and Seattle and Indiana, and we're trying to figure out, like, what does this program look like for other folks, possibly in smaller locations or other other locations. So, exporting what we can, hopefully, open sourcing our platform pretty soon, that's the kind of stuff that we're really that that gets me excited. So sustainable within our group and, hopefully, growable and sustainable outside.
And, actually, it's funny it's funny you mentioned DataMate. We just had, Derek on the program, not but, like, a couple weeks ago. Oh, perfect. Yeah. Yeah. That that's, pretty interesting that you're you're collaborating and sharing that work. Now if there's someone out there that is interested in having something like this in their community, is there a way for them to kind of start an interaction, with you folks?
Yeah. I think going back to the website, we've got a a a place where folks can drop in. We also have a, mentorship team, mentorship hyphen team team at chippy mentor dot org. It's another, email address that we use that goes directly to all of us. But, yeah, we're we are always looking for ways to reach out. We have a Chippy has a Slack that people can join as well. It's really cool. That's where we do a lot of our conversing, But anybody can hop in regardless of where you live in Chicago. We've got folks from Montreal and Venezuela in our Slack channel. So by all means, anybody can join and reach out to me directly or to other folks in the program. Yeah. We're we're always super interested in figuring out how this can transport.
So Well, it certainly sounds like a very geographically diverse, Slack channel there. And, listeners, worry worry and fret not, I will put links to these things that we've been mentioning here in the episode description for your review. Reagan, thank you for taking the time out of your day to come on. As we draw to a close here, as always, we like we let the guests have the last word on Civic Tech Chat. So are there any thoughts that you'd like to leave us with as concluding thoughts?
I think for your community, and the civic tech tech community in, in general, I would really wanna impart the idea that, that it's not just about being a great individual contributor. Right? It's it's truly wonderful, and we're we're lucky to be in a in a place where we can contribute back to our government and back to our society. But we I think we should always look for the opportunity to to be mentors in this space that we are, whether you're in Chicago and you can leverage our program, or you can look around for technological technological leaders within your area and try to find out, can I grow somebody that's gonna be a good fit for this for this role or for this organization? We've tried to figure out how to do that. And I don't know how successful we are. I think we're we're doing pretty good. But I think if everybody took, the time to think about when they're applying their skills, how much they're reinvesting it back into the next generation? How much are they putting into the next person that will have that job as volunteer or as organizer? The next job is of somebody who's building a system or building a tool for a a new program. How do I how do you get those people on? And can you use mentorship? Can you use that direct feedback cycle, that direct education pattern to get people excited about your project while growing them? There are places like Shai Hacknight that are, like, doing this so well, where you see, senior developers and junior developers working together on a project. And I think we're just one of the models of mentorship that that seems to be working. There are lots of other ones, but all of them are worth investing in. And I'm really excited to see it when anybody employs a good, healthy mentorship model. Model.
I think that's an excellent note for us to conclude this episode on. I wanna express gratitude to you again for taking your time to come on the program, share with us stuff about what you're running here with Chippy, and sharing your experiences. Again, thank you. My pleasure. Thank you, Ryan.
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