The Mozilla Fellowship and How it Changed the Way I Do Code
The Mozilla Fellowship was one of the best experiences I ever had, focusing on problems that have a direct impact on people’s lives feels way different than making software that only cares about revenue.
For my fellowship, my host organization was Majal. Majal is a non-profit based in the Middle East solving issues in the digital inclusion space, they create safe communities where people at risk can share and connect with others. I worked on building a new version of Ahwaa, with the goal of providing a better user experience and growing the community.
Ahwaa is an anonymous platform with a big community, it has more than 25,.000 messages and 9,000 members. The design feels dated and patrons were looking for alternatives in social networks like Facebook or dating apps like Tinder, which are not the best solutions given these are not designed for privacy, and given the situation of LGBT in the Middle East, this can be a life-threatening issue.
For the new version, we based our work in an open source discussion platform called Discourse, Discourse provided most of the featured we needed and could be customized through plugins, which makes it really powerful. We create a set of plugins and extensions that turned Discourse into what we wanted for Ahwaa. Here are the repositories we used so you can see how we did it.
- https://gitlab.com/majalorg/discourse-ahwaa
- https://gitlab.com/majalorg/discourse-available-locales
- https://gitlab.com/majalorg/discourse-ahwaa-chat
- https://gitlab.com/majalorg/ahwaa-terraform
Here is how the old version looked compared to the new one.
We are finalizing the last details to switch to the new version, but we don’t want to rush and would prefer to make sure everything is in place before going live.
The fellowship, besides giving me the opportunity to work on a tool that I care about, gave me tools and network to boost my work’s impact, while inspiring me to contribute back to Venezuela, the country that gave me everything to be what I am today. Venezuela is going through a rough time now, and all the help we can provide is welcomed.
Now that the fellowship has ended, I want to contribute to projects that are in the non-profit space. I’m working with the Debt Collective, we are building tools and a community to organize people and fight predatory debt.
I was hesitant to apply for the fellowship because I felt I didn’t have the background to do it, but after all, I’m glad that I did. The fellowship has changed how I see Software Engineering and I’m sure it will change your view too.
Feel free to reach out if you have questions about the fellowship or my experience via twitter or in the comments. My twitter is @eatcodetravel, I’m more than happy to help you in your path to become an internet citizen.
Thanks ❤
