Celebrating Pride
June is Pride Month for Holberton. For many, it’s a synonym with amazing parades, love, and colors, but also a reminder of the progress and challenges we still have to solve. Pride is about celebrating equality, and we can thank the LBGTQ+ community for being a force behind it. This same community has faced so many challenges, and are still facing so many. Pride month is when we come together, and we celebrate that we are at the end, one big community.
This year is also special as it is the 50th anniversary of the first-ever pride parade and the 51st anniversary of the Stonewall riots where black transgender women continuously harassed by the police fought back for their rights.
For the opportunity, Holberton Colombia students decided to build an application, BeSafe, that allows reporting cases of violence against the LGBTQ+ community, informing and receiving legal advice and counseling. The idea came up as one of their classmates who is gender transitioning shared how hard their experience was.
The goal of the team was to create an application that could collect data in real-time and that had a friendly and intuitive user interface since in many cases reporting a case of violence is a very difficult experience. You can learn more about their projects here, and access the code on Github.
The Holberton Product team customized our Checker to the color of Pride. As a school, one of our main missions is to educate. The Checker, is the tool students use to review their Holberton-related code – sort of unit test-like but also checking proper code documentation, code styling, code efficiency – is displaying one of the 12 LGBTQ+ flags at every run. For every flag, we provide a description of the flag’s meaning and its history.
Finally, because sometimes, you don’t know, what you just don’t know, the Holberton staff and Professional Advisors have put together a list of resources to learn more about Pride and the LGBTQ+ community. The list contains books, podcasts, movies, and people to follow so that you can learn with the media that works best for you! It’s on Github, so feel free to make pull requests to make the list even better!
With love ❤️