Meet The Software Engineer, Pushed By His Own ‘Scary’ Experiences Of Racism While Travelling, That Created An App To Combat This Issue

Travel, by nature and at its core, is about celebrating diversity. The very idea of visiting a new destination, meeting new people, and discovering new cultures breaks down barriers and helps us find common ground.

But unfortunately, not everyone gets the opportunity to experience a good, drama-free trip without casual racism or microaggressions whether from waiters, waitresses, or bar staff.

Believe it or not, it’s been almost half a decade since I last traveled, and as I prepare for my trip to Italy this year with my fiance I started researching if any Black couples had experienced forms of racism or unwanted aggro during their trips.

As you can imagine I found dozens of blogs, Twitter posts, and IGTV stories on the horrible experiences they had faced at popular holiday destinations.

And that got me wondering whether someone was doing anything to combat this issue and that’s when I came across The Green Book Project. It’s an app from software engineer Christian Lowe, 26, that allows travelers to determine how inclusive a business is through a unique search system based on how users identify themselves, indicated by a hashtag they place on their reviews.

For example, a queer vegan traveler could filter a restaurant’s reviews for insight into how their specific needs are addressed by the staff.

The app was inspired by Harlem postal worker and activist named Victor Hugo Green, who created a list of businesses and areas that were safe spaces for African-American travelers back in the day.

Here I sat down with Lowe to talk a bit more about his days as an engineer and what led him to launch the app.

POCIT: Had you always wanted to be an engineer?

Lowe: I very much stumbled upon the idea of being an engineer. But I did have a flirt with the idea of going into engineering when I first started college but I took a computer science course in my freshman year instead. But then I switched my majors to go into international relations and that’s what I graduated college with.

During my senior year, I was actually planning on going either into the State Department to work in the Foreign Service or teach English abroad. But I ended up getting involved in a nonprofit that a friend of mine had started and we needed a website and some other technical sort of things. So I started doing a little bit of coding because of that and then I eventually started liking it.

That’s when I had the idea for the Green Book Project and I thought this was something I can do to really help me learn more about coding and all the other tech stuff.

And from there I just became super enthralled with this idea of creating an app – so I ended up kind of just teaching myself online and I took courses from across the internet…I then went to a coding BootCamp so I could turn it into a full-time career.

POCIT: So was the app created based on your own experiences?

Lowe: I grew up in Texas and my family would oftentimes travel throughout the deep south to go visit family and it was just like this very scary experience whenever we traveled there’s oftentimes. As we would be told that they didn’t serve people like us and we had a list of all these different towns where maybe we could stop for gas but we definitely couldn’t stop at some places.

So growing up, I definitely had all these different experiences and I knew that because of the color of my skin, people would discriminate against me.

POCIT: So this was obviously your first app as a coder and engineer – how was it building all this by yourself?

Lowe: Yes, it was my first app ever, and I built it all from scratch. It was very difficult – it included lots of coding mistakes and I had major bugs that I had to fix. It absolutely required so much time and effort.

From an engineering standpoint. I think it took maybe two and a half years of just like late nights, coding weekends to build this, but it really was such a great learning experience.

The experience really helped me with my full-time job as well because I was able to apply the new skills I learned to my day job.

POCIT: You’re bootstrapping your business and you’ve also recently hired three people. Let’s talk about that – how do you set your budget and what do you look for in your employees besides the standard typical skills?

Lowe: Honestly, when it comes to hiring people, I am a huge proponent of enthusiasm and a growth mindset. I think that hard skills can be learned by a person who’s very enthusiastic and has a good attitude about learning, I see that with my staff the time, most of my staff members are pretty green in terms of like, this particular work in the tech industry. But I feel like they strongly make up for some of their lack of skill because they are really quite quick learners and they are really passionate about what we’re doing.

I check our budget every week to see what can we afford? Where are we spending too much money? Where do we need to cut back? Where do we need to pour more money into?