Ok it's happening

Heeeeeello,

Here's some updates on what's going on with Development Hackers.

The community is now public

It took me a few weeks to get everything set up properly and make sure there were no soul-breaking bugs. Turns out the opensource software I leveraged (forem.com) is very well done.
So from now on, everybody can get to this website and see all of its posts and content. You'll just need to create an account if you want to participate. You can login with Email, Twitter, Github or Facebook !

Some cool features

Data visualisation tools

I set up the Dataviz page so that you can play around with interactive charts aggregating all of the world's data about anything imaginable, for every country, for every year since 1800. First step to solving global problems is understanding what the world is really like, so go play around with these amazing tools. Can't take credit though, they were made by the wonderful Gapminder Foundation, I just integrated them on Development Hackers for easy access.

Interviews with Development Hackers

A work in progress, this is a page I set up to feature interviews with entrepreneurs who've built impactful technology that is generating income for them. That should give everyone some inspiration about what can be done !
These interviews will all link to posts on our forum where we can discuss these projects and ask questions to the founders.
Right now I'm preparing the first interviews.

Podcasts

The Podcasts page will feature great podcasts about technology, technology for good and international development. You'll be able to listen to these pods directly from the Development Hackers website !
I've got a nice long list of cool podcasts to integrate, I just need to contact their owners to make sure they're cool with having more listeners. They wouldn't need to set anything up, I'm just integrating their existing podcast RSS feeds in here.

Publish here automatically from your own blog

That's right, you don't even need to write here to publish a post here. For example, you could write amazing content in your own Medium blog and it will get published here too. You can set this up in about 10s from your profile page here. How easy can this get.

Even more features

There's loads of mini-features you'll discover along the way, (like using "liquid tags" to add content in your posts) I'm not going to spoil everything here ;)

The road ahead

I guess there's two parts to starting a community:

• setting up a place for the community: ✅
• getting people in the community: 🔜

This website is definitely cool enough for people to gather here, so we've got to put the focus on getting people in now.

I've already got a strategy set up, and it mostly revolves around getting great content on here and featured on the Interviews page. Once that's good enough, I'll post about Development Hackers in various adjacent communities etc

Though in the meantime, feel free to start using this community and bringing your people here :)

If you've got any feedback or just want to get in touch, post a comment here and I'll answer soon !

I'll keep you posted,
Rayan