100 Days later

How to Git good

TL;DR: To get better at something, practice. To form a habit, commit to do it often.

This is a story about challenging myself to get into a good habit.  About a hundred days and a week ago, I started Hacker School.  The first day there, I learned how to use GitHub.  That same day I decided to commit to committing, as part of my quest to become a drastically better programmer.

i think everyone spending a day learning to github would make a bigger impact on the world than spending a day learning to code

— Aidan Feldman (@aidanfeldman) January 15, 2014

A week later, I realized that I messed up my streak, by forgetting to commit over the weekend. Doh!

Survival Guide for a Hackathon, Part: the Second

During the fourth annual TimesOpen Hack Day, hosted at the NYTimes, my team developed an application called SayWhat.

Sunlight Foundation

The main goal of SayWhat was to take advantage of the illuminating work done by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit promoting government transparency. Sunlight harnesses the power of the internet, using technology to encourage democratic participation by creating tools and connections to open data through their APIs, so that anyone can access vital government information. Call to action of the Sunlight Foundation:

[…] we know that as government grows ever-more complex, we will all need better tools to navigate it to ensure democracy thrives. Get involved in helping us open up government, one data set at a time.

SayWhat

SayWhat is my first attempt to get involved with government data. Teaming up with 3 other attendees at the hack day, we formed a team named “Python Super PAC.” We sought a way to analyze government bills measuring various metrics of relevance, complexity and transparency. It’s a work-in-progress, but the code is up on GitHub.