About a year or two ago, I was introduced to chingu.io. I looked at it and they charged $30 for each voyage. I did a bit of research and people who participated think it was worth the $30 but I was skeptical. I bookmarked it and saw it a few days ago and suprised to see it is now free. So I decided to give it a go.

What is Chingu?

Chingu is a platform matching developers, designers and product owners to participate in a 6-week team project. It is run by volunteers.

Application Process

First, you fill in a form, select your role, and some general information about yourself and why you would like to participate.

A solo project (deployed with code and a readme file) is required to be submitted with the application. The solo project is used to verify participants skills and put them into different tiers (beginner, intermediate, advanced). After the application, applicants will be invited to their discord server which is their main communications platform.

I applied for the Advanced tier with one of my fullstackopen exercises. Then, I spent a night setting up hosting and adding a readme file.

Post Application

After my solo project was accepted, I was approved to join the next voyage. Then to fill in another google form to record my timezone and stack preferences.

My experience has been very good so far. I was given a lot of useful feedback for my solo project. The facilitators take their time to make sure everyone in the discord server knows what the next step is. The process feels very smooth and well organized.

Now to wait for the next voyage to start on the 1st of August.