Side Projects, Green Projects

I love doing side projects. There are many reasons:

1. No better way to learn some technology than to put it into practice.
2. Can actually turn into a real thing, even a day job (a good example is Instapaper, which is the "killer app" for ebook readers like the Kindle as far as I am concerned).
3. Good for showing off to current and future employers, particularly if it is semi-related to your current domain.

I had read quite a bit of gushing on Ruby on Rails from Dave Bouwman, and I had a stupid idea for a web app that probably already existed, so I thought "why not"? I searched around and couldn't find what I had a picture in my head of.

This is what I wanted:

Simple two/three line webform where a user enters in where they are, what home improvement project they were looking at. They get back a list of what their local utility company would pay for and what contractors were available for it.

The utility information was basically public and there are actually quite a few conservation programs - every kilowatt hour saved is less that needs to be generated by building new, usually dirty power plants.

Contractors could add themselves and maybe pay to show up first. I wired up a prototype last weekend and showed a coworker who deals with conservation credits like these.

Her: "I like it."

Me: "Yeah I was going for something simple and direct like Hipmunk"

Her: *looks at Hipmunk* "Yeah, you just need an adorable mascot like they do"

Me: "Exactly! How about a big cartoony green brontosaurus with a bulbous nose?"

The next day, of course, I see a link via Twitter of a website that not only does more or less exactly what I was planning, but even had the mascot I was thinking of; only orange instead of green. The mascot bit might have been subconcious, because I remember reading a blog post from the same site (via hackernews) without ever looking at their homepage.

I'm not an expert in web design (mostly backend stuff), but I think I would prefer the simple form rather than their current landing page. I think it would be more focused on responding to what a homeowner is looking for. The energy savings calculator though, is probably the best I've seen in terms of visual style.

I might keep going with this project. The fact I couldn't easily find it on my initial search (my conservation coworkers hadn't heard of it either), the landing page, and the low barrier to entry (what do I have to lose, exactly?) means I could build something pretty quick I think.

Maybe not. I have a lot of other ideas for side projects - an open source outage management system has been rattling in my head since I've had to deal with a wonky one at work. That would be a great opportunity to do some high scalability/performance stuff outside of work.

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Introducing (belatedly) nx_spatial

It's been more or less done a while, but here is finally a blog post about it.

nx_spatial is a collection of addon functions for the networkx python graph library. What can you do with it?

1. Load GIS formats into networkx graphs (where you can do all sorts of crazy analytics on them)
2. Perform upstream and downstream traces with stopping points.
3. Set sources and find/repair edges that don't have the correct to/from nodes.

Example from the wiki:

>>> import nx_spatial as ns 
>>> net = ns.read_shp('/shapes/lines.shp') 
>>> net.edges() [[(1.0, 1.0), (2.0, 2.0)], [(2.0, 2.0), (3.0, 3.0)], [(0.9, 0.9), (4.0, 2.0)]] 
>>> net.nodes() [(1.0, 1.0), (2.0, 2.0), (3.0, 3.0), (0.9, 0.9), (4.0, 2.0)] 
>>> source = (2.0, 2.0) 
>>> ns.setdirection(net, source) 
>>> net.edges() [[(2.0, 2.0), (1.0, 1.0)], [(2.0, 2.0), (3.0, 3.0)], [(0.9, 0.9), (4.0, 2.0)]]

Available on pypi or bitbucket. Eventually I want to integrate it with networkx trunk (loading shapefiles is already in 1.4).

Posted via email from The Pragmatic Geographer