& Continuous Learning

Source Allies is a technical consultancy proudly working with partners in Des Moines. We focus on application development, and trend towards newer technologies. Our strength lies in our people: talented, intelligent, and able to handle challenges in a professional manner. Our hope has always been to have a positive impact on our local community, and this blog will focus on our plan to do just that!

Years ago, we began holding internal meetings during which a teammate would present on a topic of great interest to them. From there, we cultivated a company culture built around sharing our knowledge and experience. Thus, we are excited to announce our initiative known as Source Allies University (SAU)!

We created SAU as the educational and outreach arm of our company composed of the following facets:

• Mentoring
• Public Workshops
• Community Outreach

Mentoring, in this case, is defined as the process of sharing valuable knowledge, skills and experience with another person or group to encourage, guide and motivate them to aspire to the best of their abilities. Source Allies does not have dedicated trainers, rather our teammates are able to use our team’s combined experience and knowledge with those interested.

Mentoring Program

SAU builds off of our internal mentoring experience and provides external mentoring. The purpose is for Source Allies’s teammates to share our valuable knowledge, skills and experience with our partners and the community at large. Source Allies facilitates this sharing through on-site engagements, presentations, and workshops.

Public Workshops

Periodically, Source Allies offers workshops to the greater Des Moines community. These workshops are open to the public so anyone can benefit from SAU mentoring. We tailor and deliver topics we are both skilled in and passionate about to spread our knowledge and enthusiasm.

Community Outreach

Our community outreach efforts continue to grow. We actively participate in the local HyperStream and Tech Journey initiatives, sponsor and participate in HackDSM and local technical user groups (CIJUG, IADNUG, etc.), donate to local charities like Tech Journey and Central Iowa Shelter and Services. In short, we would like to continue to become a greater part of the community! We believe it is important to participate and strengthen our local ties however possible, and look forward to expanding our efforts in the future!

Benefits

SAU provides many benefits to our partners:

We work with you – our primary objective is to help your organization improve through sharing our knowledge and experience.

Your employees produce results while learning skills, techniques and current industry best practices that are relevant to their job.

Compared to sending an individual to off-site training, we offer on-site mentoring to your teams – making the experience an investment benefiting multiple employees.

When your employees work with our teammates, they will learn faster by applying the concepts – not just reading or hearing about them.

Our mentoring is tailored to the specific project at hand, empowering your team to deliver value.

Conclusion

We are very excited to extend our hand to all those interested in bettering their technical skill sets. We hope this partnership encourages you: to help, to teach, to learn, to network, to try something new, and to do your best.

Please know we want your feedback as well. How else can one improve? If you have topics you’d like to hear more about or ideas to make our commitment to the community more impactful, we’re all ears! Thank you for your support. The future holds great things for us here in Des Moines!

Keep an eye out for upcoming SAU community events put on by Source Allies!

Our first workshop is the afternoon of June 26^th, 2015. We will present on Test Driven Development, and more details can be found at Eventbrite.