Frequently Asked Questions

What is Codebase?

Codebase is an organization affiliated with UC Berkeley that consists entirely of undergraduate students that are interested in pursuing a career in software engineering. Every semester, we work on technical projects with clients in the Bay Area to give our developers experience in the industry while providing value to the company at the same time.

How is Codebase structured?

Our organization has 4 client teams, with each team consisting of 8 members: 2 project managers and 6 software developers. All members are undergraduate students majoring in CS-related fields. The project managers coordinate the project and facilitate communication with the client company, while the developers work on coding features and tests for the project.

What is the timeframe for a Codebase project?

Our projects last for the duration of a semester (a 15-week long period) and are products that will provide direct value to our client companies. Over this 15-week period, our developers spend 500+ hours working on the project. Most projects are usually slightly independent in scope from a company's main operations because our teams must work asynchronously and remotely. Our project managers will work closely with your company to create a well-scoped project that fits both of our interests.

How does Codebase work remotely with my company?

Our team will generally set up a channel within your company's Slack to discuss the project with the relevant points of contact and engineers. We will post weekly standups that update you on our progress and share any coding resources that we are working on. We also hold two official meetings with our clients: a mid-semester and final deliverable. At these deliverables, we create a presentation to showcase our work, demo the product, and receive feedback.

What projects can the Codebase team handle?

In the past, we have worked on a wide variety of projects and topics: full stack web applications, mobile applications, data science, machine learning research, and database management and distributed systems. Our developers are skilled in picking up new tech stacks and skills, and project managers take the school break before each semester to prepare learning and onboarding resources for the developers. At the beginning of the semester, all of our developers go through a rigorous curriculum that the project managers have prepared so that they can be onboarded quickly and begin development immediately.

What added value can Codebase provide to my company?

Many of our past projects have been shipped into company products or are used daily in our clients' internal services. Just to name a few, our rate-limiting algorithms were integrated into Atlassian's internal services and are used daily by Atlassian engineers. Our DataStax data migration service was recently shipped into production. As we work with you to finalize potential project specifications, we can discuss how we can specifically contribute to your company.