May 2016

One of the things we highlighted after the beta launch of Yorubaname.com was our desire to move the development of the YorubaName dictionary more into the public domain. In the post ‘What is in a Beta‘, I mentioned that moving forward, we would like to have both the project’s backlog and codebase accessible to the general public. This would empower whosoever is interested to be able to contribute to the building of what is fast growing to be the largest dictionary of Yorùbá names on the internet.

Today, I am happy to announce that we have done exactly that. The codebase that powers both the YorubaName.com website and YorubaName dashboard application can now be found on GitHub (https://github.com/Yorubaname) where you’ll have access to 3 repositories:

1. The General-information: this contains basic general information needed to get started contributing to the project.
2. The Yorubaname-dashboard: this contains the codebase for the dashboard application.
3. The Yorubaname-website: this contains the codebase for the core dictionary and the website

With the codebase now on GitHub, we hope that the development effort behind the YorubaName dictionary, which started off in February 2015, and has been carried by four volunteer developers, will now grow to attract even more people willing to contribute expertise around software development to the project.

The development story: how it all started.

The development story of the YorubaName dictionary started off last year. It was kickstarted by an email I sent Kola Tubosun on a Friday, the 9th of January 2015.

The Yorùbá Name project had bobbed into my consciousness, though I can’t remember exactly how. If I were to guess, I would say it was via Twitter. I remember digging a little deeper into what the project was about and what it aimed to achieve and saying to myself: this would be something I would like to help bring to life.

So I got in touch with Kọ́lá, letting him know I would be interested in joining forces towards the building of the YorubaName dictionary. We exchanged a couple of emails, and by Monday, 12th of January 2015, while the fund raising drive was beginning to garner full speed on Indiegogo, we got working on our first task: setting up a prelaunch page for the project on www.yorubaname.com

Kọ́lá already knew Koko Godswill, a web/graphics designer who was also willing to volunteer and contribute to the project. He is largely responsible for the current look and feel of the dictionary. Not only did he help with the website, he has also worked a great deal towards meeting our various graphic design needs, most notably during the countdown to launch in February 2016 (See #YNLaunch).

But Koko was not to be the only person contributing. By February 2015, we got another contributor in the person of Esther Olatunde. She has helped tremendously in various ways, especially the setting up and the running of our blog at blog.yorubaname.com. We also had Luis from Brazil/UK who prepared a few mock-up wireframes on which we based earlier deliberations.

Then in April, Tola Odumosu got on board. He wrote about his motivation for volunteering here. Tola contributed substantial code to what later became the dashboard application which our lexicographers use to manage the name entries in the dictionary.

And thus from January 2015, Koko, Esther, Tola and myself were the developers who volunteered alongside Kola and the lexicography team to build the beta version of YorubaName.com released in February 2016. We were 4 technical people, located in different parts of the world: I was based in the Netherlands, Esther was contributing from Ghana, and Koko and Tola in Nigeria. We worked in our spare time towards the same goal and in a little over 12 months we were able to build a beta version of the dictionary, which at the time of writing has grown to contain over three thousand Yorùbá names.

The road ahead for the dev team

The current version of the YorubaName dictionary was made possible by the contribution of a handful of people. But now that we have opened up the codebase for more people to potentially get involved, the question is: what could be achieved next?

There is still a lot to be built. We have lots of interesting ideas and features yet to be implemented: from a ‘name finder’ feature – a tool to assist expecting parents in finding the perfect Yorùbá name for their children – to text-to-speech, to making the website more Wiki-like. We also plan on adding offline capabilities (especially for the dashboard application), improving the search experience, mobile optimisation etc.

So if you have a strong skill set in software development and you also happen to be passionate about culture and language, then the YorubaName project is something you would want to get involved with. Do not hesitate to get in touch on project@yorubaname.com. You can also, right away, fork the project on GitHub and let us start building this dictionary together!