Facebook Open Source Community Spotlight Wrap-Up

This article was written in collaboration with Cami Williams, an Open Source Developer Advocate at Facebook.

We wanted to take the time to thank the open source community members who have inspired and motivated us in the last year. In our Community Spotlight series on the Facebook Open Source Twitter page, we featured the following individuals for their achievements in growing our open source ecosystem.

Austin Akers

Seattle, USA
Twitter: @tweetmonster999
Website: https://austinakers.com/
GitHub: BboyAkers

Is Austin human, or is he a dancer? We know that Austin is definitely a dancer, but he’s also a software engineer, muay thai fighter, cellist, author, and open source contributor, which we think actually puts him in the superhuman bucket. When he’s not working with React, he co-hosts FreeCodeCamp Dallas, inspiring developers to learn and innovate. His JavaScript Solar System project certainly inspires us. Check out more of his work on his website.

Edidiong Asikpo

Lagos, Nigeria
Twitter: @Didicodes
Website: https://edidiongasikpo.com/
GitHub: didicodes

Edidiong is a Developer Advocate who specializes in technical writing and building websites . She’s passionate about uplifting women in tech, and has played a major part in building communities like the Facebook Developer Circle Uyo. In fact, Facebook recognized Edidiong as one of the 40 Icons of Change for her work building the technology ecosystem in Nigeria. She’s quite literally iconic! Check out some of her articles on open source, including “Open Source contributions: A catalyst for growth” and “The Technical Writers Guide to Contributing to Open Source Projects”.

Ceyda Cinarel

Seoul, South Korea
Twitter: @ceyda_cinarel
Blog: https://cceyda.github.io/blog/
GitHub: cceyda

Ceyda loves machine learning. She self-learns languages (English and Korean, in addition to her native Turkish), which informs her machine learning work on natural language processing, which informs how she thinks about learning languages, which informs... you get the idea. And her love for machine learning doesn’t stop at linguistics. We’re obsessed with how Ceyda did her master’s thesis on neural networks for webtoons! She collected data sets of colorful webtoon comics and trained machine learning models to color black and white images. If that isn’t the coolest thesis ever, we don’t know what is. Check out her blog post on model deployment for PyTorch.

Ebenezer Don

Lagos, Nigeria
Twitter: @ebenezerDN
Youtube: Ebenezer Don
GitHub: ebenezerdon

We love the videos that Ebenezer has made on his YouTube channel about how to get started programming and using open source! Among our favorites is his video “Learn Git and GitHub in 20 minutes”. Recently, Ebenezer released a new course on YouTube and Skillshare, “Learn Database Management by Building Instagram with JavaScript and IndexedDb”.

Manjula Dube

Berlin, Germany
Twitter: @manjula_dube
Website: https://www.manjuladube.dev/
GitHub: manjula91

Manjulia is a software engineer with a passion for teaching and accessibility. In addition to being a ReactJS open source contributor, she is a founding member of Mumbai Women Coders, an organization that uplifts women in tech and provides opportunities in the tech world. Her dedication to her community inspires us. Oh, and have we mentioned that she’s casually a professional hip hop dancer who has danced with famous Bollywood celebrities? Check out her online book, " Building accessible websites 101" to learn best practices for building inclusive web pages.

Ekene Eze

Nigeria
Twitter: @kenny_io
Website: https://www.ekeneeze.com/
GitHub: kenny-io

Ekene is a leader in open source and developer advocacy. We’re inspired by his community-first approach thinking about tech, and especially love his talk The State of Payments In Africa, which covers the shift in payment systems in the formerly cash-only Kenyan economy. Now as a Developer Experience Engineer for Netlify, he has gotten on stage at a Google Developer Group summit in Lagos to talk about Building Customizable Checkout Experiences. If you are interested in getting started in GraphQL, Ekene's blog post, GraphQL: The good and the bad, is a must read.

Samson Goddy

Port Harcourt, Nigeria
Twitter: @Samson_Goddy
Website: https://samsongoddy.com/
GitHub: samswag

Samson is one of those people in the open source community you have to know about. He’s the co-founder of Open Source Community Africa, a maintainer of Sugar Labs projects, a board member for Open Source Collective, and a consultant for African governments on technology. We’re inspired by his community-driven approach to tech and his commitment to democratizing open source. The future is here, and Samson is determined to make sure that it is evenly distributed.

Michael Liendo

Davenport, USA
Twitter: @mtliendo
Youtube: Michael Liendo
GitHub: mtliendo

Michael is an AWS community builder, React developer, and internet explorer with a soft spot for tacos. Whoever you are, Michael has created a little something for everyone. We’re obsessed with his custom React hook for writing the best dad jokes, as well as his Slack Clapback command to “ADD👏🏾SOME👏🏾SASS👏🏾TO👏🏾YOUR👏🏾SENTENCE!👏🏾”.* Go check out his video "AWS Amplify: Adding a RESTful backend to ReactJS", and subscribe to his channel for more tech content.
*: Learn more about digital blackface and embodying Black personas here.

Annie Liew

Toronto, Canada
Twitter: @anniebombanie_
Website: https://codepen.io/anniebombanie
GitHub: anniebombanie

Annie is the ultimate designer-developer hybrid, and the owner of the most aesthetic personal website you’ve ever seen. We especially love her posts sharing her experience being a bootcamp grad, being a designer turned developer, and chasing curiosity over passion for code. You can read more about her experience on Medium, and check out her front end magic using React and other open source libraries here!

Anna "Apero" McDougall

Leipzig, Germany
Twitter: @AnnaJMcDougall
Youtube: Anna McDougall: Developer
GitHub: AJMcDee

Anna used to stage operas, and now she stages code. This former professional opera singer turned software engineer is passionate about developing software using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and React. On top of being a full-time student at the Digital Careers Institute, she also writes blogs full of coding tutorials, motivational messages, and career advice. If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about algo-rhythms and scalability, Anna is your person!

Pauline P. Narvas

Leeds, England
Twitter: @paulienuh
Youtube: PaulineNarvas
GitHub: pawlean

Pauline is truly a powerhouse. Not only is she an open source champion, she’s also the host of Inspiring Figures, a series of conversations with the people that you should really know about. You might also know her from her incredible work ethic on #100DaysOfCloud challenge (the AWS Solutions Architect Associates are lucky to have you!), her motivational workout gainz, or as the person who took over the #a47da4 hashtag on Instagram. She is tech goals, she is fitness goals. Consider us a fan!

Olu Niyiawosusi

London, England
Twitter: @oluoluoxenfree
Website: https://olu.online/
GitHub: oluoluoxenfree

Olu is a web developer, ethical technologist, philomath, creator, accessibility advocate, self-described nerd, and maximalist, among other things. They wrote an amazing blog post: Building the Woke Web: Web Accessibility, Inclusion & Social Justice. The post highlights the importance of making the web an inclusive place, identifies barriers to accessibility, and suggests some solutions. It’s a must-read for anyone creating on the web, and challenges the open source community to make the web a better place for all. Get to know Olu and their work on their site, and while you’re there, develop an appreciation for cats that smell like dogs in the gig economy.

Victor Ofoegbu

Nigeria
Twitter: @vick_OnRails
Website: https://victorofoegbu.com/
GitHub: vickOnRails

Victor is building the future of the web. While his commitment to React is what first caught our eye (peek those React Native case studies), we were especially inspired by how Victor embodies the spirit of invention. He so rapidly learns skills, builds projects, and shares them with the world on his website. When he’s not spinning off new side projects or honing in on his web dev skills, he’s dishing out learnings on his learning process, which is pretty meta.

Monica Powell

New York, USA
Twitter: @indigitalcolor
Website: https://www.aboutmonica.com/
GitHub: m0nica

We are so appreciative of all the work Monica has done for the React and open source community this year. She is an advocate for accessibility in open source for people of all backgrounds, and is the founder of React Ladies, a community for women and non-binary React developers. She publishes her content regularly on Egghead and on her blog. Check out her blog “ Keeping Server-Side Rendering Cool With React Hydration“.

Prince Wilson

New York, USA
Twitter: @maxcell
Twitch: maxcellw
GitHub: maxcell

If you like building things, bringing people together, accessibility, tech security, Prince is your go to person. We’re inspired by their work making CS education accessible to all as an instructor on egghead.io, a Twitch streamer, and a Yale University faculty member teaching web dev and software engineering. We have also been informed that Prince will code and speak about tech for a pet corgi, which is some deeply relatable content.

Logan Yu

New York, USA
Twitter: @loganyu
Website: https://www.loganyu.com/
GitHub: loganyu

Logan is an open source champion. Not only does he bless us with his ReactJS and PyTorch content, he’s also a contributor to the GitHub Arctic Code Vault, a snapshot of millions of repositories archived in a decommissioned coal mine deep beneath an Arctic mountain in Svalbard, Norway. Logan’s GitHub commit history blew our minds, and 1,000 years from now, when archeologists rediscover the vault, we expect them to be just as blown away.

Thank you to our Facebook Open Source community, we are excited to see what you create in 2021!