It’s been a busy week.
Scott Philips is presenting HealthAround.me in Pittsburgh, PA today (June 13th). Civic Ninjas was awarded a grant from the Knight Prototype Fund back in January, and this is a chance for the projects to show what they’ve built. I imported Pennsylvania census data, so that the visualizations would show live data in Pittsburgh. I also failed to learn AngularJS in an evening, so it’s on the to-do list. The rest of the team did amazing work on the front end, visualizations, wristbands, and fleshing out metric descriptions. Scott will report back next week on how the demo went, and we’ll figure out next steps.
I’m on the Cultivate918 team investigating “building an online resource center with an actively managed calendar of events”. I’m suspicious. Why does the community need the calendar? Is it a marketing site for event promotion? Is it for picking events based on speakers and topics? Is it for facilitating networking? I’m a fan of Portland’s Calagator, which aggregates calendars for hundreds of tech events, but this feels like a poor fit for Tulsa. There are some Oklahoma City efforts, Made in OK and Sivi, which might be part of our solution.
Step one for me is lots of discussions with different people around town, to identify the core needs and desires. I feel that the solution has to excite and engage entrepreneurs (and not just support orgs), or it will be dead on arrival. And, when we do start work, I want have analytics in the first release.
For django-multi-gtfs, I’m tackling some long-standing tickets on the path to 0.4.0. I converted the code to run under both Python 2.7 and 3.4, which took a few nights. I got a lot of useful advice from Brett Cannon’s post on his experience with caniusepython3, Django’s docs on porting to python 3, and the six docs. The biggest pain point was the built-in csv module. In Python 2.7, you read and writes bytes, but in Python 3.4, you read and write unicode. I should have converted the Python 2.7 code to unicodecsv first, and I still might. For now, I’m ready to move on to the next ticket.
In the indefensible project, I’m working through a d3 book, learning about layouts. I’m almost done with the book, but it still feels like a tour of d3 rather than a tutorial. I’ll have to cut my teeth on a real project before I get d3. Or, maybe I picked the wrong book, and should read a different one.
It’s not all work. It’s my daughter’s tenth birthday this weekend, and she’s having a sleepover. It’s been a week of getting the house in order, assembling presents, and getting ready. I’m reading A Feast for Crows, and I’m worried Cersei is really screwing things up. I haven’t seen the Apple keynote yet, but boy have I heard all about it.
And, I’m trying to make my company a real thing, and regularly blog again. You’ll know if I succeeded this time next week.
Links:
- Kathy Sierra on Expertise – My favorite thing this week. An excellent follow-up to her 2009 talk.
- CensusReporter.org – Attractive interface to census data. For example, here’s the distribution of Oklahoma census tracts by how many have inadequate plumbing. There’s an area in Tulsa where 12.6% (give or take 11%) of the occupied housing units don’t have complete plumbing.
- Assessing Tulsa’s Entrepreurial Landscape – a good assessment of where we’re at, and suggestions on where to go next.
- Shnap: Shoelaces’ new sidekick – I supported this local Tulsa project. I think it will work well on my chucks, and keep my laces out of the bike gears. It looks like it will fund, so join today.
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