Open Data Day with Open Columbus
07 Mar 2020Meetup
Happy Open Data Day! Today I traveled to Easton to participate in the Columbus celebration of Open Data Day. The hosts of the event were Improving (the venue and the food) and Open Columbus (the meetup group who organized the event).
We started around 9:30 AM with an introduction to the group and the projects that they have been working on thus far. Some people pitched ideas they had to utilize open data sets to make projects that would benefit the public.
I chose to join a group working to make an application to improve biking safety in the city. The idea is that cyclists can report incidents or rate their route. The data would be available as they plan their next trips and also available to city planners building new biking infrastructure.
We spent a lot of time talking and planning out a minimum viable product. A retired software architect in our group suggested we working in Node because another group had just recently build their app using it. Though I’ve felt pretty strong about all assignments in Tech Elevator so far, attempting to do something as simple as get the users current location and display it on a map using Google Maps APIs proved incredibly difficult. While Phil (the retired architect) completed one back-end API endpoint, I fumbled through a lot of documentation and acheived nothing substantial.
At 4:30 PM we presented what we had accomplished. I felt a little bummed that I couldn’t have done more. My teachers and mentors at Tech Elevator were in the back of my head (“Show your skills in languages you know. Don’t try and build something in an interview with a technology you have only dabbled in.”) I should have started with a Maven Web Application.
At the end of the day, I had a good time working through a problem that I face as a bicycle commuter and imagining a solution to benefit the entire community. I networked with Business analysts, UX Designers, Senior Software Architects, other students, and City Planners. It was fun to get so many minds working towards a common goal even if it didn’t amount to much.