CODE 2015

This weekend I participated in a hackathon called CODE (which stands for Canadian Open Data Experience). I've had good momentum participating in a long-haul hackathon series working on DC Action for Children's Data Tools and here I am making apps using open data for social good again!

For this hackathon I used R and was my own one-person team. Why did I choose to use R? Well that's the only language I feel relatively comfortable with. Still I had to resort to the help of Excel/Access/SQL as I use these everyday for work. I feel humble at a lot of hackathons being one of the few in the rooms not coming with a page-long slate of technologies that I can use. RStudio has a nice web app framework for non-web developers and within the course of a few weeks between my registration for CODE and the actual hackathon that was the only reasonable technology I could manage to learn!

So here is my app. It's the first web app I've ever built all by myself. Basically it looks at 2014 air quality health index data provided by Weather Canada and tells you what times of the day have best air quality! I hope it's going to be helpful for people looking to take advantage of cleaner times of the day as well as local governments interested in improving overall air quality (quite a huge statement right?). I've seen some news about a personal air quality sensor attached to a phone and think it's a pretty cool idea. The average person can't care less about NOx or SOx levels (unless you're in energy or environmental consulting) but air quality data could inform things like retrofits or maybe choosing clean commutes or running trails. So much to dream about.

The top 15 of CODE will be invited to present in front of a panel of judges some time next month. While I'm pretty sure I'm not gonna be one of them, I'm glad I got something pretty cool to add to my personal portfolio that I could use later in my career, not to mention I learned a bunch of new commands and tricks to deal with data, i.e. all the fun stuff :-).