On January 29th, we announced Sentry’s Open Source Grant, and, quite frankly, we were pleasantly surprised by the applications we received. Thank you to everyone who applied — we sincerely appreciate the time and effort spent detailing your open source hopes and dreams. The passion demonstrated in these applications is what keeps the open source community innovative and, well, open.

Congratulations to Frances Coronel, Open Source Lead at Techqueria and recipient of Sentry’s first-ever Open Source Grant! She has been working professionally as a developer since 2015 and has both a Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science. Her passions outside of work include contributing to open-source, public speaking and mentoring other URMs in tech. She has been involved with Techqueria as an open source lead since 2018.

As one of the largest Latinx professional communities in tech, Techqueria build spaces around career advice and development as well as events, conferences, and speaking opportunities.

Techqueria is volunteer-run, and Sentry’s Open Source Grant will allow them breathing room to create a member portal that better engages their community through user profiles, job boards, and event calendars.

We’re excited about the targeted and thoughtful approach toward inclusion and community-building that Techqueria embodies in all of their projects.

We wouldn’t feel right ending this post without acknowledging some of the other applicants we reviewed. Here are eight projects we think are worth checking out:

Distribute Aid - Connecting aid suppliers with on-the-ground distributors for helping the refugee population throughout Europe.

anemone - Creating a mental health crisis app that can assist people in a mental health emergency.

lollipop cloud - Creating technical documentation for people to use inexpensive arm single-board computers to create their own personal clouds, with the ultimate goal of accessible, dynamic users manuals.

lufthaden - Building a network of cheap air quality sensors. Sensors are built by volunteers, and data is used by universities and local environmental initiatives.

matterhorn - Enabling developers to experiment, and quickly and securely develop production-level backend systems by providing preconfigured, modern development tools. It is built with Node.js and comes with configurations for Microsoft’s TypeScript type system, Facebook’s Jest test runner, JS Foundation’s ESLint linter, and Microsoft’s Azure DevOps CI pipeline.

plots2 - Aims to provide information, tutorials and build a community for DIY people interested in environment and scientific research.

readthedocs - Aims to host documentation for the open source community free of cost.

EteSync - Secure and privacy respecting sync for contacts, calendars and tasks.

Thanks again to everyone who applied! We can’t wait to see what Techqueria creates over the next three months. Keep your eye out — you just might see an update blog post soon.