Appfrica Labs: Building an Army With Thumb Drives

I’ve mentioned before that I started Appfrica with no external financing, it’s all privately funded by my work as a web developer. For now at least, that’s been the best way to execute my vision for helping African software developers take advantage of opportunity, learn new skills and offer them a space and the tools to work outside of school. In preparation for Barcamp Africa I thought I’d profile the inner workings of Appfrica Labs for people who are new to the blog…

The Problems: Most East African students lack credit cards (because they aren’t available to the majority of the public period) and so they can’t buy their own web server space. School hours limit their working hours. Overcrowded computer labs render software security measures and ongoing projects rather useless as kids have to move from computer to computer….whatever is available. Furthermore, internet is sporadic and unreliable…even when the school labs are available. Internet cafe’s are expensive and not always a viable option.

Solution: I’m installing Damn Small Linux and LAMP on USB Thumb Drives and giving them to the kids I work with, to allow them to work from anywhere, as long as a computer is available. This isn’t the perfect solution as it requires access to a computer, but one problem at a time until more resources are available.

Damn Small Linux
Damn Small Linux is a linux distro that’s meant to be lightweight and flexible…so lightweight that the entire OS can be run from a 2MB flash drive! DSL can be started from within Windows or it can be used to boot up, allowing them to work on a project without worrying that files will be deleted or erased from their host machines at a computer lab or internet cafe.

LAMP
LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP. The four together are the inner workings of most web servers. In order to run a web application you need several things: a physical web server with an OS, a web server (it runs the scripts and code that make up applications and web sites), and you more often than not need a database server. There are alternate versions of the stack configured for Macintosh, Microsoft and Sun with alternatives to Apache but the idea is that with any *AMP server you can develop, debug and deploy a web app from anywhere.

Right now I operate everything out of my house, with one or two students coming over once a week to work on whatever task may be at hand. These USB servers allow them to run secure, completely localized web applications from their USB sticks. They can walk around with their projects and work on them when they have the opportunity and they can also hand in their drives with their ‘assignments’. One developer, Paul Engulu (a PHP developer) has been using this model to come out every Saturday to work on Afridex and some other applications that he feels confident contributing to.

Until there is space, computers, and all the other things need to run a successful lab, this is how we will operate and so far it’s been a very formidable arrangement. Building an army of strong software developers, one flash drive at a time!