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Ask HN: As a software engineer, how can I help with Coronavirus?
4 points by msencenb 2275 days ago
Are there any open source projects, nonprofit organizations, or other special situations that need extra software engineering firepower during this time of crisis?

Being stuck at home is an environment where most of us can still be incredibly productive in and I feel shitty sitting here without being able to help (beyond being socially responsible and not going out into the world).
4 comments
jka 2275 days ago
Please try to find other high-impact projects or community efforts which best utilize your time before considering this, but:

I've been working on https://www.reciperadar.com which is an open source recipe search engine and meal planner. The idea is that people can use it to find meals with the ingredients they have available at home and from their nearby shops - which may be highly variable at the moment.

I'd appreciate any input, whether it's your feedback about the user experience, reports of bugs / data quality issues, translation fixes, feature requests or code contributions.

Good luck finding impactful projects to work on!

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mtmail 2275 days ago
"Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers" https://helpwithcovid.com/ (yesterday's HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22615453)
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FroshKiller 2275 days ago
The same way as anytime else: Make donations to charities and individuals in your community. Your money is almost always worth more than your programming at times like these.
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streetcat1 2275 days ago
Since there are a lot of children on an extended vacation, it is a very good time to arrange a mega online course teaching programming (not a youtube tutorial)

The other thing which is critical is creating a COVID-19 home testing kit or any sort of testing automation / automatic testing pipeline.

The only way out of this situation is extensive testing, but from reading around, the current testing time (from mouth to result) is around 4 days.

I think that testing will be an integral part of daily life until we have the vaccine.

I can also envision that verifying that you are not a carrier, will be part of a day to day procedure.

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