Alex Toohey

← Back to the campfire

A story told at the campfire

Code for Good

Recruitment chair and full-stack developer: building technology for nonprofit clients and the teams that make it.

Code for Good builds full-stack software for nonprofits that could never afford an agency. I spent over a year as a developer shipping solutions for those clients. It’s the rare kind of student project where the users are real and the alternative to your code is a spreadsheet and a prayer.

As recruitment chair I ran the other side: the processes, strategy, committees, and events that decide who joins. Recruiting for a service organization is its own design problem: you’re selecting for people who will show up in week twelve, not just people who interview well in week one.

Both halves taught the same lesson from different directions: software for nonprofits succeeds on reliability and handoff quality, because after you graduate, the code stays.