Congratulations to Bret Truchan, Wevise’s Volunteer of the Month for February. While much of Wevise’s mission is promoted by public-facing volunteers and our marketing team, Bret is among the many volunteers working behind the scenes to keep the very fabric of our nonprofit strong and intact.
Bret is a full-stack engineer at Wevise. He works to implement important features on the website, which requires knowledge of the entire code base, from front-end architecture to back-end.
Over a long career, Bret has dabbled in all aspects of programming. He was a software developer for 16 years before finding himself more in leadership roles and focusing on engineering management and product management.
“Coming to Wevise has been fun because I’ve been doing management for a long time and hadn’t been doing a lot of software development, except in my free time,” he said. “And I’ve been writing code almost every day of my life since I was 11!”
At Wevise, his contributions have made a big difference. He has created an availability calendar that mentees can use when they first connect with a mentor, so that they can properly select dates that then get sent to all parties. He is also working on code that protects the administration section of the website from arbitrary access.
Volunteering at Wevise means different things to different people, and for Bret, it means finding a genuine group of people who share in the mission. “It’s like a noble thing to do, you know, after working at some companies that are mostly out there for profit. It’s a cool new experience,” he said.
But it’s not just helping Wevise spread the tech mentorship mission that gives Bret purpose here. It’s the chance to lend his experience to help current and future volunteers. For example, Bret has been writing onboarding documentation for new developers.
“I get to help out a team that I like,” he said. “It’s something I didn’t have when I started and so I was like, okay, you know, I should leave this behind for the other developers.”
And if any developers have questions for Bret, they can ask him about more than just standard programming. They could ask him, perhaps, about music, because Bret has spent several years creating open-source music software for electronic musicians. Or they could ask him about Japanese cooking, a hobby that Bret has more than just a passing interest in. At one point, he ran a Japanese cooking meetup group that, for a time, was one of the largest cooking groups on Meetup.com at some 2,000 members.
Regardless of whether he’s asked about coding or different types of Japanese pickling processes – “I love like pickling, I’m like a mad scientist experimenter with Japanese food” – Bret has found a comfortable stop on his career journey.
“It’s been just really pleasurable working with everybody,” he said.
