Any way for everyday programmers to help solve important problems?

Yes, join a company or organization that is doing work you feel is important and help them achieve their goal with your skills. A lot of these companies get left behind because they can't pay enough or don't have the prestige.

Coders seek companies that pay very well and or have a bright future without giving much thought about that company's product or how it's impacting the world. We need people like you that want to make a difference to improve the world with your coding skills.

I keep hearing that academics have a terrible time writing code and I help one that I know on occasion. Maybe volunteer that skill?

Mostly automating trivial stuff that you will scratch your head at them doing by hand.

> I would like to use my downtime to try and make a difference

Make sure that this is also restorative to yourself. All work and no play makes Johnny an anxious grumpy boy who does more harm than good.

Non-profits, at least the sort I've been involved with, have very few employees because they have very limited funding, and therefore all their employees do a huge amount but it's mostly networking, managing events and fundraising.

There's just no coding to do really, what they want you (wanted me) to do was manage all the IT stuff including the service provider that they had already dumped everything on.

They were honest with me that there was no way they could budget to hire me, and not much stuff was stimulating in a technical way, so I put in my time, got a recommendation that got me a paying job and moved on.

I don't recommend pursuing an area that you don't have a deep personal connection to, regardless.

Use your skills and expertise to land a job working with K8s ->get rich->donate to your favorite cause!

https://komodor.com/blog/vcs-are-betting-big-on-kubernetes-h...

Maybe that's how you can help - start a website that links non-profits that need software with volunteer devs that want to help.

Like workaway.info but for software devs.

I believe one of the most effective things you can do is limit suffering and waste in this world.

You don’t have to find a cure or solve it yourself. But there are too many kids and adults in this world that were not as lucky as you and me to develop and learn and reach a stable career.

What can you do to limit the youth going to waste?

Talk to people. Listen attentively. From there very small acts of humanity can make a huge difference.

Excel at what you do to get higher pay, so that you can donate more to NGOs and non-profits that solve the important problems.

you could start a website/matching service like:

https://www.catchafire.org/

except, instead of being that, you have a very narrow focus.

spend an hour, get a domain, pimp it on here, put your own ad up there to start things off, and slowly figure out how it can/should work.

my guess is there are lots of folks out there like you who want to work on something important, but don't want to do 'shit work'.

and i think that's fine, as far as it goes, but there is no site that i know of right now called:

https://iwanttohelpbutnoshitworkplease.com/

and at least one of the reasons that site does not exist is b/c nobody is honest enough to say it.

like, i want to help, but only within a very limited scope.

so, somebody wants help with wordpress? nope.

for starving kids? still wordpress? sorry.

formatting so.... nope.

wri..... nope.

train a neural network model to... OK, now you got my attention.

maybe a core task, the first any requestor could ask for, is...PRD (product requirements document). The requestor knows what they need to happen from a 'business' perspective, but doesn't know how to put it in nerd terms.

the nerd -- presumably, you, to start -- puts it in nerd terms, or approves it for listing on the site, at which point it becomes an ad on the site.

it's just like every other volunteermatch-type site out there, except it only lists actual coding jobs -- sort of like Stack Overflow jobs. love it or hate it, it doesn't have a lot of (any?) non-dev jobs.

https://stackoverflow.com/jobs

put those average programming skills to work! :-D

A quick Google search for “open source climate change” returns a number of promising projects, such as this list: https://awesomeopensource.com/projects/climate-change

I remember reading that the Zodiac Killer's cryptic messages were decoded by private citizens. Seems more niche/enthusiast but hey.

Some things to think about

- Build tools for legal aid

- Helping a volunteer organization with their website

- Building a site where users can see hospital prices in their area

Work at Igalia.

One word: bitcoin.