Fostering community is at the core of who we are as individuals and a company.

Our mission is to build strong communities that deliver stellar member experiences, so businesses can quantify the impact and become the next generation of community and Developer Relations leaders.

We’re currently a small team and each of us has deep ties to community engagement. Our co-founders Patrick and Josh have contributed to developer communities at companies like Algolia and Keen IO. Josh also maintains various open source projects and regularly speaks at community events. Together, they created the Orbit Model, an open source framework that helps organizations measure and grow their communities.

Nicolas, a software engineer based in Paris, expanded his engineering skill set thanks to community sharing of videos, online courses, and other content. He was driven to give back and started writing blogs, speaking at meetups, and attending conferences. This led him to found JAMstack Paris, a meetup group for dev engineers where he met Josh.

Alex is a junior software engineer who spent all of 2020 building her coding skills with the goal of making a career transition into web development. Along the way, she built a community by documenting her journey and blogging about her progress, as well as starting a podcast and email newsletter for other creative women along their own coding journeys. She's also a mentor for other early-career developers at The Collab Lab.

Chance is a senior software engineer based in San Francisco, CA. After spending the past five years building developer tools for companies like Librato, he’s convinced in the importance of growing developer communities. He believes the purpose of software is solving actual problems for people and will always advocate on behalf of the user.

At Orbit, we talk a lot about value capture versus value creation, with the goal being to encourage the latter. Patrick created the podcast Developer Love, to unpack how to build successful developer communities. Check out episode 6, where Patrick interviews Tim O’Reilly and discusses why it’s so important to create as much value as possible.

While COVID-19 has accelerated the remote-first trend, it’s one that is here to stay. You can now be part of a community regardless of where you are physically, which makes the work at Orbit more pressing than ever before. Engineers who join the team should be similarly passionate about engaging in the community and excited about helping businesses do so on an even larger scale. If that sounds like you, definitely reach out!

Our vision is to build a fairer future by providing a better understanding of the past.

We believe that past mistakes shouldn’t determine future job prospects. Our team works with several organizations focused on re-entry and education programs operating inside prisons. We have an internal committee, Bounce Back To Work, that meets weekly to focus on outreach and collaboration with different organizations across the country, helping get people with criminal records back into the job market. Every quarter, a few engineers volunteer to help teach valuable software and coding skills to inmates at San Quentin, helping them earn 30x more money than with the typical manufacturing jobs available while incarcerated.

Money is personal and people aren’t algorithms, which is why education is key.

We’re an inclusive community and strongly believe our services shouldn’t be off-limits to people in need. For instance, during the height of the pandemic, we paused membership dues for those affected. We also have an awesome puzzle wall of donations and we give those funds to clients who need a little extra help.

In addition to 1-on-1 education through our formal training sessions, we also engage with the community by regularly hosting educational and fun meetups and events (which are open to anyone, not just clients) at our HQ in NYC. These events will also take place at our new LA, DC, and Brooklyn offices. For example, our “Wine and Learn” events include topics like Investing 101, The Art of Travel Hacking, and How to Meal Prep on a Budget. While they’ve been remote during COVID-19, we hope to be back in-person as soon as it’s safe to do so.

We also have monthly “Regional FinFit Group” meetups in various cities at bars or coworking spaces (again virtual for now). These are run by enthusiastic clients (anyone who wants to raise their hand) and we reimburse them for the costs. Engineers are more than welcome to participate in these events, in-person and remotely.

Finally, we also offer resources on our blog including articles about how to maximize your credit card perks and why you should still save for travel (even if you can’t go anywhere right now). You can also check out Martinis and Your Money, a podcast hosted by our CEO Shannon McLay, which covers topics like how to crush student loan debt and entrepreneurship. In particular, we recommend checking out the “Financially Naked” episodes (one of the podcast’s most popular series), which mimics what a client’s very first session with their trainer would be like. It’s a great place to start if you’re curious about how our mission can help people from all walks of life. We recommend this episode featuring Sean, one of our full-stack software developers.

A common thread through all of us is a desire to make a tangible impact on real people.

At Alto, we have an overarching desire to “help the world,” and tackle an outrageously high medication non-adherence rate (the rate at which people don’t take their medication properly, or at all). However, we are largely motivated and inspired by connecting with the individuals we’re trying to help. That’s why we take so much pride in our Yelp reviews, have a Slack bot that posts every survey response we get from a patient, and why once a month, we volunteer at the SF Marin Food Bank. We want to be in touch with and give back to our community, personally and face-to-face. This is the common denominator across all members at Alto; we bond with one another as a result of bonding with our community, even when that means repackaging 3,000 pounds of cashews at the Food Bank.

You’ll interact directly with users and decide what we build to best serve our community.

Building a successful open source project is more than just writing code – it’s also about building an engaged and satisfied community. As a Founding Engineer at Grouparoo, not only will you be writing code, but you’ll also share your work with the community and determine what to build next. Everyone at Grouparoo interacts with our users and helps build our community. takes many forms. Whether it’s via blogging, conference talks, solving customer issues, or supporting their deployments, you’ll have a hand in crafting our community tools and platforms as we grow.

Community is at the core of what we do.

We believe that no one is powerless and making change can be a part of everyday life. Change.org is an open platform that gives a voice to a wide range of perspectives so people everywhere can take action on the issues they care about. Every campaign you see on our platform is started by people in our community – people in your community. People and organizations around the world use Change.org to start campaigns, mobilize supporters, and work with decision makers to drive solutions. To that end, our campaign teams located in many different countries work directly with petition starters to provide them with the tools and support they need to amplify the impact in their local community or worldwide.

The passion for the product and the work we do at Change.org is contagious! We’re dedicated to making a meaningful impact on the world and it shows. Our weekly all team meetings, where employees from around the world call in, are just one of the many moments we get to celebrate victories from our petition starters and the work of our campaign teams on a regular basis.

Our team regularly visits conferences, meetups, and other local events, sometimes also virtual events.

We try to engage with the community on to see where the development of the tools and frameworks we use will lead to, and also to exchange ideas with others. Conferences include the PHPBenelux Conference, Dutch PHP Conference, ConFoo and ZendCon. We also have a local PHP User Group in Mannheim that we support and sometimes host in our own offices. Organizing and hosting unKonf allows us to interact with, support, and help build up our community.

Last year, Stephan presented a session on NomadPHP, which is a virtual user group for developers that does not have a local user group in their area, as well as with NomadMage, a similar version but for the Magento Community. We have traveled to different user groups and conferences to demo our open source contributions as well as connect with the local communities.

We see ourselves as denizens of a broader community.

As a company, we want to recognize the role tech plays in a greater context and create inclusive communities both internally and for our customers. We identify as denizens – part of the local and national community – working to protect privacy by making data access safe and secure for everyone. While this is our company’s mission and focus, we also want to do more. As a team, we commit time and effort to initiatives to help people vote, help run infrastructure for COVID-19 research, and have thoughtful company holidays like Election Day.

Our dedication to serving our greater community is something we’ve bonded over. Before we worked together on Indent, we collaborated on privacy-first tools to help people find their polling place and a ballot tool that encrypted your data so no one else could see your ballot. We helped around 3 million people get out to vote with Vote.org in 2018. While we’re no longer working on voter participation tools, this experience served as a launching point for how we can make products and decisions that align our business initiatives with meaningful improvements to the privacy of so many people.

Trade-offs: As a team, we participate in our communities and do what we can to advocate for accessible privacy as a right. We see our product as the sum of our abilities, perspectives, and beliefs to help restore trust in tech.

We encourage everyone to write blogs, give talks, and contribute to the community in any way.

Our team members speak at conferences all over the country including Railsconf, ElixirConf, QCon, O’Reilly, Strangeloop, SXSW, Lean Startup Conference, Pluralsight Live, among many others. We have a group within the company called Outreach for people to help come up with ideas for talks and review talks. Speaking allows you to distill your knowledge down into something that is accessible to others, become a part of the greater community, and mentor and inspire others in the community. We also provide assistance for travel. For example, one of our engineers, Anna, is on the board of RailsBridge and runs ElixirBridge, and we fly her around the country to do Elixir workshops on the weekends.

To many of the developers at Carbon Five, speaking at conferences is important on a personal level. Courtney, who supports a variety of initiatives like Railsbridge, Women Who Code, and Balanced Team, says “I think seeing women on stage speaking about something that they know showcases that there is a body of work that a diverse set of humans is responsible for. To me, that is the greatest opposing argument to the anti-diversity mindset. Plus, it’s just fun.”

More locally, we also host a speaker series and hack night that is open to the community. We host many events and invite you to come.

Our relationship with our users can be best captured by how we came to hire Haris.

Haris was a PM at Curbside (a company in San Francisco), and also a Universe user. He loved the product so much and wanted to help grow the community of users who loved it as much as he did. When I, Joe, first met Haris, we weren’t hiring for a full-time community role, but after many conversations, we decided to create that role for Haris. Our 5th hire is devoted to building, supporting, and growing our community of users.

We are all users of our own product and we all interface with Universe’s other users every day. We all do customer support. We also have a tab in our app called Explore where we highlight some of the best creations from our users, and we have a lot more coming soon on this front.

What we’ve heard from our community is that they love their sites but they want more people to see them. They want to engage with other creators in our community. We’re now building out the ‘network’ side of Universe, so that creators can engage with each other and build their audiences inside of Universe.

Our sense of community extends far beyond the walls of Instacart.

From an engineering perspective, we love talking about what we’re working on with the greater engineering community. We share best practices at our SF HQ and our Toronto engineering hubs; host popular podcasts (Kaushik Gopal, Senior Staff Engineer, is the co-host of the Android podcast, Fragmented); speak at and host multiple meetups a quarter (Women Who Code, RLadies, Bay Area Python, etc); demo and speak at conferences (Lesbians Who Tech, Pycon, DroidCon, ElastiCon, Collision); and regularly contribute to open source projects (Coil, Lore, Jardin, TrueTime, and more).

On the social impact front, we aim to nourish our communities by helping remove barriers to food access and providing grocery delivery to the most vulnerable of populations. All full-time employees do a shopper shift as a part of their New Hire Orientation and the pay rate for these shifts are automatically donated to Feeding America (a hunger relief organization). We also have Volunteer Time (we do an annual week of service at key times where support and volunteers are needed). Lastly, we also donate groceries to communities in times of need. For example, in 2018, we donated food and supplies to the firehouses in Butte County and LA County during the California Wildfires.

Our mission wouldn’t be possible without regularly sharing facetime with the community.

The engineering team and executive team members all help with outreach. We have multiple Hackbright mentors, regularly volunteer together to help the elderly community, and participate in panels and conferences. For example, we recently launched our own annual conference where industry experts can share their knowledge about the aging community. This year, SAGE/2019 featured speakers with unique perspectives in their fields (doctors, policy experts, business owners, technologists, and more) came together in one room to ideate on how we can advance care that maintains dignity for the aging population. The conference was completely sold out and an important step for us to continue being leaders in what we do. You can also see a list of upcoming events featuring Honor panelists here.

We are proud to be based in Oakland and be a part of the business community here.

The business landscape in Oakland is much smaller than it is in San Francisco and in the rest of Silicon Valley, and we like being a part of it. Oakland as a city is a community-driven and grassroots. We often go to First Fridays every month together as a company (as it’s right down the street from our office), do our best to participate in building up Oakland’s tech community.

We host monthly Coffee and Code meetups for the Oakland chapter of Girl Develop It. We’re partnering with Code Nation for annual summer internship programs. Code Nation equips students in under-resourced schools with the fundamental coding skills and professional experiences that together create access to careers in technology. We highly recommend other companies to participate!

We are more motivated by impact than money.

Given our strong ties to WordPress, participating and making an impact in the web community has always been at the forefront of working at Automattic. One community-building staple: WordCamp, informal conferences organized locally by people in the WordPress community. Automatticians regularly attend, speak, or volunteer to help organize WordCamp, and if there isn’t a WordCamp within 60 miles/100 kilometers, we cover expenses for attending.

Automatticians getting involved in local or global communities, for software developers and beyond, including Head of Mobile Eli Budelli speaking at try! Swift, and JS Engineer Lena Morita, serving as a Director of the Tokyo chapter of Woman Who Code.

Giving back to the developer community — on WordPress and beyond — is a greater priority today than ever before in our company’s history. Understanding and improving diversity of all types in our hiring and team composition has taken center stage. We’re proud to share our recent study of how technical women can best navigate their careers, but the work in diversity is just beginning. We’re working on it each day, whether it’s participating in Mindset Month (a 6-module video series) with our partners at the CoachDiversity Institute, or constantly iterating our approach to diversity and inclusion.

We are active members in our local communities in Colorado Springs.

Our CTO, Patrick, runs the local JavaScript meetup in Colorado Springs, where they discuss and engage in all things Web Dev once a month. Our engineers are encouraged to attend any conference they’re interested in, too. These are great opportunities to learn and share best practices with our greater community, and to network with our peers.

BombBomb also has a dedicated philanthropy twist. We have strong partnerships with local organizations like Mary's Home and Springs Rescue Mission (both of which focus on rehumanizing those who have been dehumanized in our community) and we offer 2 hours of Volunteer Time Off (VTO) every quarter. Every year, we participate in big events like helping Mary’s Home build a garden or participating in “trunk or treat” for their kiddos.

We believe in being involved in the community and using our position to improve the places we live.

Our CEO sits on the board of a local nonprofit and every office has a budget they can use to support local causes and events they are passionate about. Our annual user group always has a raffle or donation request for a cause we believe in. Last year we asked all of our attendees to bring gloves or winter clothes for the Chill Foundation that helps inspire youth to overcome challenges through snowboarding. Learn more about how we volunteer at Inntopia!