Hacktivate

I recently offered a 50006000 kwacha (about 35 USD) bounty for a Malawian to
solve my problem of easily adding RSS feeds found by Firefox to Thunderbird and Soyapi Mumba solved it.

All of the pieces were already there. The Livelines
extension offers control over how Firefox handles detected RSS
feeds, and Thunderbird is a pretty decent feed reader. But for some
reason they weren’t connected to each other properly. Soyapi
investigated and found some bugs both on the Thunderbird side and the
Livelines side. Basically neither tool is handling the feed:// protocol
properly, so Soyapi hacked Livelines to make the feed:// string
acceptable by Thunderbird. And it works - rejoice! Download the hacked official version
of Livelines (with Soyapi’s patch) here.

So that was cool, but probably the best part of this whole experience is
that Soyapi, myself and Boster another Malawian programmer, met for
lunch after he solved the problem. I paid up (and he paid for lunch!),
but then he walked me through his solution. In doing so, I learned about
the architecture of Firefox and Thunderbird extensions, and how the XUL and Javascript sourcecode for
Firefox and Thunderbird are already on my machine and begging to be
hacked. I knew XUL was cool, but had never spent any time learning it.
With Soyapi walking me through it, it now makes perfect sense. For
client side GUI applications that can’t be done in a browser, XUL just
might be the way forward.

So I am thinking that software development via bounty just might be a
great way forward, especially for the developing world. Perhaps it is a
new chapter in software engineering as a whole? I have some more ideas
to make Thunderbird’s handling of RSS feeds really great (caching
images, more uniform handling of different feed types, overall better
offline functionality) so perhaps I will setup more bounties and maybe
even facilitate bounties for individuals or groups from abroad. Stay tuned!