Another weekend, another room full of people who would rather build something than complain about it. The spring codefest brought together developers, students, city staff, and a few civically minded strangers who wandered in for the pizza and stayed for the transit data.
A few things that got built: a trip viewer that turned the raw GTFS feed into an actual route on an actual map, ten lines of code and one very smug developer. A first pass at mapping the open datasets scattered across the region, so we could stop rediscovering the same spreadsheet every month. A weather mashup on the university’s station data, which is open, real time, and refreshingly machine readable, a phrase that should not feel like a luxury but somehow does.
The recurring lesson, the one that shows up at every one of these: the data is usually there. It is just wearing a disguise, filed under a name no human would guess, in a format chosen by someone who appears to hate you personally. The work is translation more than magic.
Thanks to everyone who came, built, and argued about date formats until midnight. Notes and datasets from the day are making their way online. The next one is already being planned, and yes, there will be more pizza.