Show HN: Get free development help for your Covid-19 related project
Yura and Nikita here - we're the co-founders of YouTeam, a marketplace for building offshore dev teams. Today I want to present to you http://volunteer-developers.com/ - the directory of dev shops providing free coding or testing services to the companies that help fight COVID-19.
A couple of weeks ago we published a listing of deals that various businesses posted in response to the current pandemic crisis. It quickly got viral and went on to becoming #1 page on this topic on the web. One of the websites that post a link to our listing was Sam Altman's "Help with COVID-19" clearinghouse project. Inspired by it, my co-founder Nikita posted a message in our company-wide Slack channel, that started with the words "Let's save the world!". He described his idea to go one step further, and see if we can not just list the deals and discounts, but offer something highly valuable - like the time of software engineers - for FREE.
I thought this is worth trying for a number of reasons. The most obvious one, as a marketplace, you always see part of your job being sort of community builder. So it felt almost as a duty for us to try to organize the 400 dev shops listed on our platform to help the current situation in the way they can add the most value - by writing the code!
After sending across the email, we were surprised by the amount of positive feedback. It turned out many dev shops now have good engineers "sitting on a bench" due to the customers cutting down development budgets. They don't want to lay these engineers off: the talent is the core asset of those businesses and they invested a lot of money in their recruitment and training. So our call came about very timely for them.
So far we have 10 teams listed but plan to add more.
Would love to hear your thoughts!