Keeping Busy during Covid-19 and Programming to Help the Vulnerable
During the Covid-19 times, and having to work from home and endure a reduced social interaction with colleagues and friends, I have been keeping myself busy with personal projects. One project in particular is Ghorbe Clinic.
Since April, I volunteered as web developer, and I have been planning features and implementing them for the project.
Last weekend, we released our website, which is a simplified ticketing system, where medical questions are assigned to doctors who lead conversations with their patients. We plan to add voice and video conversations in the near future (WebRTC).
So what is Ghorbe Clinic about? From our LinkedIn page:
ghorbe-clinic.com is a telemedicine initiative, by a number of volunteer Syrian medical and non-medical professionals, to help vulnerable Syrians get medical advice and consultations, especially in refugee camps where access to non-emergency medical help is hard or even impossible.
Ghorbe is a word that denotes the state of being a stranger, alone and away from your home and family.
We built it as a website instead of native mobile apps, because Syria (More like Assad’s dictatorship) is sanctioned by the USA. Google Play Store and Apple App Store are not available there, so there is no point. But this opens the doors for other exciting opportunities to work on modern web features.
We implemented cache of static files using Service Workers. Our natural next steps are: Push Messaging, Notifications, Background Sync, and eventually full offline support for those with intermittent internet access.
The project is currently running on AWS Free Tier with minimal costs. We already made use of EC2, S3, RDS (MariaDB), Elasticsearch, ELB, SES, Cloudfront and more to be used yet.
Outside the technical aspect, I’m privileged to have the chance to work with other Syrian professionals whose wide expertise contributed to other aspects like legal, media production, marketing, management, translation, and of course the medical doctors who will make the most important contributions by answering medical questions and help the most vulnerable Syrians.
This project comes amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the total failure of the Syrian “authorities” to handle it. We hope that we will make a difference in the lives that we will touch.