Feature in Business Insider: Resistance Map
Published (gregorian) (ornellember)
In June of 2020, I sat bleary-eyed in my makeshift home office and felt like a useless fraud. What was the point of sitting all day writing code for money when outside, there were Black people being killed and brutalized every day? At the time, I had a friend staying over for a couple of weeks who usually lived with an immunocompromised relative, so the risk associated with marching was irresponsible. I still knew there was something I could do.
I thankfully found and joined a group of Black developers on Discord who were interested in building software to help the cause. At the same time, I saw several lists of bail funds and gofundmes circulating on Twitter. I decided to make an easy resource to connect people to ways they could help the cause of racial justice near them. 2 of my best friends helped me populate an Airtable database, and Resistance Map was born.
Shortly after releasing this resource, a journalist at Business Insider reached out to me with some questions. At the time, I asked him to remove my name from the title and description of the article (it’s still in later parts of the article.) I felt uncomfortable and uneasy having this amount of attention on me at this really difficult time and the last thing I wanted was self-promotion. But a few months later, I want to post this, to share my experience writing software for a purpose, software that’s political, and a project that was honestly highly efficient (entirely built in 48 hours, directed tens of thousands of visitors to resources and orgs for Black Lives Matter.)
I’m currently working on another side project with friends that combines software, research and racial justice, and I’d like to write another blog post soon about my experiences and learnings doing this kind of project. In the meantime, here’s the Business Insider article about Resistance Map.