Bringing Algolia’s Core Values to the Community

At Algolia, our core values of grit, trust, care, candor, and humility are at the forefront of how we collaborate with each other and how we work for our customers every day.

But one of the things I like most about this company is how we also carry these with us to the community. You’ve already seen this in our contributions to community knowledge through our talks and presentations. You’ve likely interacted with our search on the websites of open source projects — a service we provide free to improve developer experience on the web. And, if you’re a not-for-profit organization, you may even have our search on your website.

It was no surprise, then, when my colleague Tim Carry reached out to me on Slack. You see, I had recently moved to Paris from Brooklyn and over the lunches we shared every day in our then-new office, I shared the things I missed: the too-short, too-late, and too-maligned G Train; $3 bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches from Aristo on Myrtle Ave; and, above all, teaching coding on the weekend to students at General Assembly.

Tim is probably the most widely-connected person in the Paris office and he had recently met another American in Paris. She was starting an organization that hoped to teach coding to refugees and was looking for people to teach the courses.

Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to help her organization, Konexio, develop a curriculum and teach it to dozens of students who come from places like Sudan and Syria. The goal of these workshops haven’t been to turn students into expert developers in just a few weeks time, but instead to make them more comfortable with code, introduce them to concepts that may have seemed magical before, and, importantly, bring them further into the community.

During the classes we focus on HTML and CSS. It allows us to give them skills that will hopefully stimulate their interest in coding so that they can go on and learn deeper technical skills. Some have, while some have decided instead to use what they’ve learned in their day-to-day without going deeper. Either track is great!

Recently, Konexio announced a crowdfunding campaign and an expansion into general technical skills for the refugee community. I’m excited to see what Konexio will do in the future and look forward to Algolia continuing to share our core values with the community.