006 · 2026
Build 4 Latam
Build 4 Latam is the multilingual home for LATAM builders shipping emergency-response tools: country hubs, project submissions, voting, comments, and the community redirects people actually use. It grew out of Build 4 Venezuela. I co-organized the effort and built the platform that holds it together.
- Role
- Co-organizer · design engineer · platform (with Crafter Station)
- Status
- Live · open source
From one country to a region
Build 4 Venezuela started as a focused response: give people a place to publish and find tools that help in an emergency. Build 4 Latam keeps that spine and opens it across Latin America — a country selector on the way in, hubs for Venezuela and Colombia, and a shared projects layer (list, submit, detail, vote, comment) so work does not die in a chat scroll.
Decision
Locale first, spam second
The surface is multilingual by default (next-intl across es/en and more), because the builders and the people who need the tools are not in one language. On the write side, submissions and comments go through validation and AI Gateway spam checks before they become civic noise. Auth is Clerk; durable data is Neon with Drizzle, so the catalogue survives a redeploy.
How it's built
The routes builders touch
I owned the product surface end to end with the Crafter Station team: the Latam landing and country hubs, authenticated submit/edit flows, project pages with optimistic votes and comments (TanStack Query), markdown descriptions, and hosted video embeds. Shortcuts like /whatsapp, /discord, and /luma are first-class redirects — the boring URLs organizers actually paste into a night of coordination.
Honest outcome
The platform is live at build4venezuela.com and open source. It is still growing country coverage and still named after the first chapter. What I can defend is the framing: publish tools in public, in the languages people speak, with enough product to survive without a spreadsheet.