AllReady - Moving to the Next Level

3000+ commits, 1000+ pull requests, 120+ contributors and 2 years of development. This has been an amazing ride, in so many ways, and so revealing in how developers around the world are wanting to jump in to use their skills to help the greater good.

AllReady - Level Up

Okay, community, you’ve responded to the call. Now it’s time to take this to the next level.

AllReady is a production-ready application. We have real-world tenure and work with national level organizations to help organize volunteers. Through our software, we can empower communities to best use their limited and valuable resources to prepare for disasters.

Heroes are found amongst those who respond to disasters and those who help us prepare for them. However, preparedness efforts often go unreported. AllReady brings visibility and participation to the preparedness campaigns of the humanitarian organizations who work every day to reduce and ideally remove the impact of disasters big and small. - Tony Surma, Co-Founder and Vice President of HTBox

Community Jumping In

Be it in the recesses of their own space, crammed in a room with other developers or even through a virtual code-a-thon, the development community has embraced AllReady and the Humanitarian Toolbox cause.

Code-a-thon In Bellevue

Originally conceived as a “technical demo with purpose”, AllReady has grown into an application with a healthy set of features.

AllReady is designed to to deliver preparedness services by replacing pen and paper with web and mobile apps. Our volunteers will be using AllReady to organize the installation of thousands of free smoke alarms. Traditionally, our focus has been on the heroic act of disaster response but in understanding that the mission of the American Red Cross is to alleviate suffering, isn’t it equally noble to empower volunteers everywhere to try and prevent that suffering in the first place? - Jim McGowan, American Red Cross

We’ve been through a couple of iterations, seen great feedback from different groups and skill levels and still managed to make significant progress entirely by the grace of our incredible volunteers.

Hacking Together

We’ve done our best to implement architecture worthy of production, automated build, test and deployment processes and swung with all the punches the changing world of .NET Core has thrown at us. And, when need be, we even get contributions from the ASP.NET team itself.

So far, we’ve encouraged developers of all skill levels to join the cause. We’ve mentored folks along the way, introduced them to git and GitHub and, of course ASP.NET Core. We’ve seen stars rise and get their Microsoft MVP based on their contributions and other community involvement (congrats to you , Steve!).

But where we stand now, the game is changing a little.

Where This is Going

We’ve put a lot of thought into taking the next steps of this project. It’s clear that the time has come for us to put the call out to senior developers who can make big impacts on short cycles. However, we don’t want to exclude anyone and we will continue to support anyone who wishes to contribute, maintaining “up for grabs” issues and giving feedback through pull requests.

Planning the Next Steps

Up next on this project is some heavy lifting. We need folks to take our I/O bound code and move it into Azure functions. There is some refactoring that needs to be done to prevent “lava-flow architecture” from prevailing. We need to up our client-side game and move to a more modern and appealing JavaScript framework and client-side modules written in TypeScript.

Who We Need

As such, we’re putting the call out, starting today, for senior developers who consider themselves as capably independent devs who can equally write c# and TypeScript and take cues from designers on how to get the UX just right.

We’re looking for some designers to take our project and imagine what a better user experience would like. We need your help to draw a few references and do some conceptual work on a few screens for us to use as both inspiration and guideline.

We’re hoping to find connections to other charitable

The Tech Stack

You can be on any platform; the project runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. You don’t need Visual Studio 2017, but it may make your life a little easier. Minimally you’ll want a capable text-based IDE (like Visual Studio Code).

If you’re doing personal inventory, here’s what we’re after:

  • strong experience in ASP.NET (Core is an asset) and the MVC Framework
  • familiarity with libraries like AutoFac, MediatR and AutoMapper
  • past exposure to Azure cloud services like Azure Functions, Service Bus, Application Insights and storage
  • comfortable working with git, branching, forking, GitHub, pull requests and other similar concepts
  • familiarity with connected services such as SendGrid or Twillio

If you don’t have these, but have a strong desire to learn, we’d also love your help, so please consider joining. There’s lots of work at all levels, priorities and complexities!

How to Connect

If any of this piques your interest, we implore you to reach out!

We have semi-regular Community Standups which you can find on our YouTube channel.

You can fork, clone and contribute via our GitHub repo.

You can find us on Twitter and Facebook (and the main HTBox Facebook page as well).

You can join our Virtual Code-a-Thon which runs from November 10-26, 2017.

Once connected on one of those avenues, we can also get you into our Slack channel to ask questions with project experts and leadership alike.

Help Us Get the Word Out!

Please tweet out this call to help, share it however you do social and let those who may be interested in joining the cause know about what is going on.

If you are a member or leader of a user group, please share with those in your community.

If you’re interested in having a code-a-thon featuring the AllReady project, please reach out to us and we will help you co-ordinate and even keynote the event if you like.

Thank you for taking a moment to help code for the greater good.

Happy Coding!