Alessandro Castellani - Founder of the Akira Project and Lead UX Architect for Thunderbird at Mozilla

Advance Tech Podcast

Written by Adam Dymitruk

In this episode we interview Alessandro Castellani, Founder of the Akira Project and Lead UX Architect for Thunderbird at Mozilla. Join us as we ask Alessandro about his background and how he got into design, open source and moving to Linux.

We discuss the motivation for the Akira project and how the kickstarter campaign is structured to achieve significant goals this year. The project is explained in relation to the missing piece in the Linux space for end-to-end design tooling. Although related projects exist, we examine the many reasons why a new project is needed.

We explore the reasoning for choosing the development platform, language and other choices. There are great benefits to the Linux ecosystem that manifest in the form of really useful libraries and how contributors already suggested existing work to move the project forward.

The exciting new role at Mozilla as the Lead UX Architect for Thunderbird is covered along with the path that took Alessandro there. This includes other projects that he authored including Sequeler and Taxi as well as the many tutorials he has authored on Youtube.

Hope you enjoy this episode!

Show Links

• Akira Kickstarter
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• The Vala Programming Language
• Elementary OS
• Blender
• Next Gen on Netflix
• Sequeler
• Taxi
• Youtube Tutorials