Holberton students use their tech skills to solve COVID19-challenges
The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting all of us on so many levels – professional and personal, physical and emotional. It’s often the most trying circumstances that ignite the greatest discoveries. Like many in the tech sector, a number of Holberton students and alumni have been inspired to develop technology to help pave a path forward. We’re excited to highlight five of these projects that embody Holberton’s innovative spirit while reflecting the needs of this moment in history:
Knowing that many people are struggling to maintain a healthy routine while sheltering in place, Holberton Tunisia 🇹🇳students Yasmine Hamdi and Ahmed Omar Miladi built Yawmi. The app schedules activities based on the user’s calendar and preferences. By partnering with 3rd party platforms, Yawmi suggests online courses, fitness sessions, cooking classes, gaming, movie watching, and more. The day planner aims to develop the users’ skills and knowledge in a flexible way, mitigate mental health issues, and create a healthy lifestyle. The duo started building the app during the OMAC (One Million Arab Coders) COVID-19 hackathon. They made it to the semi-finale out of 1,260 teams – congratulations!
Darcie is a virtual assistant that helps people find the nearest social services in their neighborhood or city. Co-creators from Holberton San Francisco 🇺🇸 Akeem Seymens, and Max Stuart built this tool that works with phone and text using IBM Watson, Google Cloud, and Algolia (who provided a free Pro version of their powerful Search indexing service to support their effort). Their goal is to address COVID-19-related humanitarian issues, beginning with the mounting issue of food insecurity. While many Americans were already food insecure before the pandemic, the number has increased dramatically in recent weeks. Resources that were already strained are even more so now, and food banks are stretched beyond capacity. Partnering with feedingamerica.org, nokidhungry.org, hungerfreeamerica.org, and America’s Food Fund, the team has been collaborating to establish data gathering standards and systems to help food distributors get additional support and get resources to more people in need.
Holberton Colombia 🇨🇴students Camilo Morales, Jose Luis Diaz, Oscar Riaño Tapias, Daniel Chinome, and Giovanny Perez built EnTuBarrio. Small businesses we are suffering as shelter in place guidelines required people to stay in and prevented people from shopping. This clever team found a way to help both parties – the store and the shoppers. EnTuBarrio connects customers to their local stores so that they can buy the groceries they need. The delivery is handled by locals riding bikes or walking, making it cost-effective, fast, and environmentally friendly. All the communication currently happens over WhatsApp, but the team is working to port the app to Facebook Messenger chatbot as well.
As the COVID19 situation was unfolding, Holberton New Haven 🇺🇸students Jose Alvarez de Lugo, Stephen Ranciato and Gareth Brickman noticed that there wasn’t a place to get COVID-related data for Connecticut in a consistent and clear way. They thought we could help their state by building something quickly, so they began writing code right away and were able to deploy a website that very same day. That’s how CTCovid19.com came to be!
Spaced is a mobile app that tells users when and how to go places for necessary errands while optimizing for social distancing. It’s like Waze but for walking. Built by Holberton alumni Bobby Yang, he came up with the idea while he was attempting to walk his dog and go to the grocery store. He found there were way too many people in the park next to his house, and there was a long line at the Safeway half a mile from his house. The app leverages different open source projects like MIT’s COVID-19 Tracker and Open Routing Service, along with Foursquare’s Places API. Spaced is able to recommend specific times to go to popular locations, as well as routes to reach locations while minimizing the number of people with whom users come into contact. The data is completely anonymous, and Spaced’s code is open source and can be found here. It will soon be available for download on iPhone and Android.
Stay safe!