Software Developer
Real projects, real users, zero red tape — lend your dev skills to a Baillieston Scout Group's home-grown stack. Volunteer, remote, your own time.
Flexible, remote, in your spare time — volunteer
We quietly build our own software — and we’d love a hand. This is a voluntary, unpaid role for a developer who wants to do a little good with their skills, on small things, in their spare time.
We’re a small Scout Group in Baillieston, in Glasgow’s East End, that’s ended up running a surprisingly real stack of home-grown tools. There’s always something small to pick up: a new feature, a rough edge to smooth, a little utility a leader has asked for. Think of it as a friendly sandbox — except the projects are small, self-contained and genuinely used by a real team every week, so the work actually lands.
Ideally you’re a mid-level developer who loves the outdoors and Scouting (or is curious about it), and who’d enjoy chipping away at small, useful things rather than signing up for a big commitment. And if you’d also like to get involved working directly with our young people, brilliant — this role sits happily alongside that, but it absolutely doesn’t have to.
What we’ve built so far
- A public Astro + Firebase website (this one) with a gated leaders’ area
- A development-plans-to-Kanban system, where our strategy documents track their own progress live from a project board
- A leaders’ backoffice CMS and a set of small leader tools — cost calculator, campsite planner, camp-badge creator, team-structure editor
- Privacy-minimal accident reporting, a news pipeline, public volunteer/contact forms and automated email — all on Firebase
- Integrations with Online Scout Manager (OSM) and Google Workspace
Our stack
- Frontend: Astro, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, a little vanilla JS
- Backend: Firebase — Cloud Functions (TypeScript / Node), Firestore, Storage, Hosting; some Google Workspace APIs (Gmail, Drive)
- Sister app: a React + Node/Express + Postgres CMS
- Integrations: OSM API, Google OAuth / Workspace, Cloudflare Turnstile
You don’t need to know all of it — pick the bits you enjoy.
A taste of what’s on the list
- A youth-voice / section-forum tool so young people help shape the programme
- A waiting-list view built on live OSM data
- A certificate creator and a risk-assessment builder for leaders
- Small quality-of-life improvements to the tools leaders use every week
The important bits
This is unpaid and voluntary — done for the love of it, in whatever time you have. There’s no rota and no on-call; you take on small pieces when you can. Full support, a friendly team, and your PVG/Disclosure check is covered (you’ll be working around systems that hold members’ information, so the usual Scouting safeguards apply).
Interested in this role?
Apply directly, or have an informal chat first — no commitment.