#BlackLivesMatter 🖤

Hello friends,

Black lives matter. Full stop.

This week is dedicated to Black makers. 🖤

Pariss Athena

Black Tech Twitter

On December 1, 2018, Pariss Athena created #BlackTechTwitter with a single tweet. The response to that tweet, thousands of Black people in tech posting photos of themselves, directly challenges the notion of the "pipeline" problem, where technology employers claim that they can't find people of color to fill their roles. Since this legendary tweet, Pariss has helped to amplify the careers of large numbers of people through her work, including the Black Tech Pipeline, an organization that brings exposure, resources, and opportunity to Black technologists. Her response to the events following the death of George Floyd has been powerfully insightful.
 

Justin E. Samuels

Rebuild Black Business

If you have talent to offer; design skills, front-end development, back-end programming, design systems, etc., Rebuild Black Business is looking for makers to help support destroyed Black businesses due to the chaos generated from the nationwide protests last weekend. There's a Discord group chat, with plenty of opportunities to help. Rebuild Black Business was put together by Justin E. Samuels, organizer of render(ATL), and In Streaming Color.
 

Jacques H. Bastien

Nappy

Stock photography is notoriously non-diverse. Jacques H. Bastien, an entrepreneur and college professor who runs Creative Freedom and SHADE, built Nappy, a collection of beautiful high-res photos of Black people for free. All photos are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license, which means you can download, modify, and share the photos for free.
 

Take Action 🖤

Follow and support Black makers. If you have the means, consider donating to a worthy cause or signing a petition at https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/.
 

Next week 📅

Next week I'll be continuing to document my journey to write an eBook on the Jamstack. You can check out how I'm building authentication into a Gatsby framework in Protect GatsbyJS with Auth0 for Single Page Apps.

Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌

Hit reply to tell me what you're making. I'm looking for anyone interested in talking about their own side-projects and maker journey, so speak up if you'd like to appear in Serial Maker. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. And don't forget to continue the conversation on Discord!

Until next week,

Craig