The Alice in Wonderland Project seeks to do the seemingly impossible - give new devs real world experience being part of a remote software development team before they have a software development job.

“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” ~ Alice

The Alice in Wonderland Project is an experiential, project based learning open source project to help new developers learn GitHub workflows and being part of an Open Source team. It also provides opportunities for devs with software work experience (e.g. 6 months all the way to senior dev) to level up their leadership skills by being maintainers that act as "team leads" onboarding new devs, reviewing PRs, providing code reviews, and doing some mentorship. Team leads work in pairs to help balance out their work/life/Hacktoberfest balance. Teams are kept to a maximum of 6 new devs and two team leads thoughout Hacktoberfest so everyone has a personalized experience.

As the focus is on learning GitHub and how to work as part of a software dev team, the app is a simple and fun html/css/vanilla javascript text-based game with a Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland theme. It doesn't make sense to try to learn a complex tool using a complex codebase. That's like using one black box to learn how to use the other black box.

Diversity and Accessibility (A11y) is key! We strongly encourage applications from groups that are under represented in tech. Participants will gain a good understanding of coding with an accessibility first mindset - and as part of the developer experience (DevEx).

• End of August/Beginning of September: Applications open for project team leads
• September: Talks and workshops - dates and formats tbd
• Mid-end of September: Applications for new devs (contributors)
• October 1st, 2023: Start onboarding first cohort of new devs
• October 15 (tentative!): Start onboarding second cohort of new devs

• Contributors:

  • Are new developers in training (self-teaching, bootcamp, university students). Minimum skills are basic html (yes, that simple!)
  • The number of new devs will be limited to keep the focus on a quality experience. A low contributor to team lead ratio will be kept to help everyone deal with the craziness that is Hacktoberfest.

• Team leads/ Maintainers:

  • Developers who are currently working as software developers.
  • Team leads should have real world on the job experience working as part of a dev/engineering team with regular pushes/commits to GitHub.
  • Work in pairs to help balance out their work/life/Hacktoberfest balance.
  • Guide a team of up to 6 new developers from onboarding and getting their local environment set up, to doing their first PRs, though to writing and contributing code. Some may also help new devs, who've done 8-10 PRs do their first code review and co-approve a PR.

This Hacktoberfest 2023, join other new devs to learn GitHub workflows and how to contribute to open source by building a fun, text-based, vanilla javascript game. The game is inspired by Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland movie where Alice rescues the Bandersnatch from the Red Queen and races across Wonderland (called Underland in the movie) to get to the White Queen's castle. She has to stay ahead of the red card soldiers, and navigate all the challenges along the way.

We ask that you check your ego at the door/entrance to our rabbit hole and focus on developing your teamwork and communication skills. The code is simple and vanilla on purpose. As devs we all love shiny new things and fancy code - but complexity for the sake of complexity isn' a good practice. It also makes it hard to actually learn anything. It's so easy to get a case of "S.O.S." - Shiny Object Syndrome. With The Alice in Wonderland Project the shiny things are all the Git and GitHub, teamwork, and communication skills. We just happen to be building a fun vanilla Javascript game along the way.

Are you looking to level up your leadership and mentoring skills? Would you like a fun, community oriented environment to mentor new devs and practice your team leadership skills? Welcome to The Alice in Wonderland Project! Here you'll work with a partner, or as a team of four team leads to guide new devs through all the steps in the process of contributing to an open source project.

This game was originally created as a python console game as part of an online computer science course at Massey University, New Zealand in 2020. The assignment was the classic Camel Game from "Program Arcade Games and With Python And Pygame" and originally conceived in 1979 in "More BASIC Computer Games".

However, the premise of the game is both racist and colonialist - stealing an camel from the "natives" and racing away from them across the Mobi desert. So I changed the theme to Alice from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland movie rescuing the Red Queen's Bandersnatch from his imprisonment and racing across Underland to get to the White Queen's castle. I also added a random chance that the player would be attacked by the Jabberwocky, be killed, and the Jabberwocky poem would print on the screen. Note that the course instructor was about to ask the class to change the game's theme because of the issues - I was just a few minutes faster than her in posting.

The Alice in Wonderland Project started a lot of enthusiasm, but without much planning during Hacktoberfest 2022. Getting involved in open source and learning GitHub workflows can be intimidating and challenging for new developers. So I created an open source repo to help other new developers learn GitHub work flows, learn how to contribute to a remote team project, get involved with open source while being social and making something fun.

However, I've since realized that I was actually creating something more than an open source project. It's (2022 version) the fledgling curriculum of a project based learning program. I stopped teaching in 2019, but I guess I've never actually stopped being a teacher. The best way to accomplish the goals of the project is to take a pause, reflect, and start over using my teacher skills to create a comprehensive experiential, project based learning curriculum.

I'm currently working on the organizational structure, project flow, onboarding process, and building out a private demo of the project.

I do know that onboarding will include new devs doing at least two PRs (Pull Requests) where they copy and paste part of the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland text from Gutenberg.org into a Markdown (.md) file in the docs. That way the focus is on the process of doing a PR as well as a bit of learning Markdown/writing documentation.

It's important to have a working demo so that team leads and myself know what order to release the issues in and what the potential merge conflicts will be. Unlike most other open source projects where the focus is on building an application, here the process of building the application is being used to teach the processes of GitHub and software development teamwork.

I'll tentatively be accepting applications for team leads at the end of August/first week of September as I'll have the organizational structure, Mission/Vision/Values, and Code of Conduct done by then.

Cheers, Elizabeth (Liz) McCready GingerKiwi Toronto, Ontario