Building https://proxynow.org/
There I was mindlessly scrolling through my youtube feed, waiting for something to stimulate me. Then I see a My First Million podcast titled “Shark Tank for UMich students”, as a long time mfm enjoyer, I start watching. Internet Activism just happened to be one of the pitches in the video, and it’s mission really resonated with me, and I wanted to help so I joined the discord. I got into the discord pretty early, and asked to help, where I was allowed to join the development team.
At this time, Internet Activism was working on a really helpful project for those impacted by internet restrictions in Iran. The idea was ProxyNow would help educate people about proxies, allow them to register their own, and run an script on their operating system, to regain access to many websites that the Iranian government had blocked.
Initially, I took up the job of designing the setup proxy page, which, in hindsight looks sub-par. In my defense, it was my first time using Tailwind so I was unfamiliar with all the classes and such, but I slowly got the hang of it.
Then the founding team was asking for a revamp of the Internet Activism website. I got straight to work. With my new found knowledge of Tailwind, and now strengthened TypeScript skills, I essentially matched the figma.
Version of website I designed
Perhaps my greatest contribution to this project would be fetching the information from a firebase backend, and visually displaying this. This took a lot of work, firstly formatting the entries on the database, and then using certain IP adress api, to get the actual countries.
Nevertheless, after a few hours, and some of guidance from Luqman, we were able to get this proxy-list up and running, and it will be implemented on proxy now in the near future.
From strengthening my TypeScript skills, to learning a whole CSS framework, to conditional rendering, data mining, and learning how to resolve conflicts between versions, I learned a lot from this experience. I also met a bunch of great people whose vision of using technology to help improve others’ lives aligned with mine. Before the only way I had worked with CSS was custom css-classes. I also learned how to git clone specific branches, which is a really useful thing to know while working in a team environment. Luckily, I already knew how to pull request,and merge my commits that way, but that is also something that you first learn in a team setting as that is how large scale projects are made.
The reason I joined Internet Activism was because I truly believe in the mission. Their team is founded on ambition, and everyone there is relatively young. Just today, they launched https://shelter.internetactivism.org/ aiming to help those who were affected by the earthquake to find homes and relief. I am excited to see what other impactful projects Internet Activism will undertake in the future, and I am honored to be a part of this team.