We got someone to handle all the business development and financing stuff for us. Jarryd is a former investment banker and currently an MBA student at Wharton. He’ll be helping with everything from outreach to web copy to hopefully teaching himself some basic coding, too. It’ll be really helpful to have someone on the team who can approach the roll out from a business perspective, rather than a tech perspective, so we’re really lucky to have him!
Mockups
Andrea came up with some killer mockups for the new user interface! We can’t wait to start implementing them. She’s been working with Tristan on coming up with a better UX for the app and they’re making great progress.
BigApps BigBuild
We went to a BigBuild event today for the NYCBigApps competition. We met a data scientist there named Ding Li who helped us get a draft of a coldmap we can use to show 311 heating complaint data using Tableau. We’re going to build a more robust version in Leaflet and integrate our own data showing where violations are actually occurring across New York City. It’s going to be really cool to see a visual representation of the 311 data, and hopefully it will allow us to do some targeted outreach to community organizations working in neighborhoods with the highest volume of complaints.
Design Lead
The BigApps competition is giving us some much needed structure. They’re encouraging us to bring on people with more diverse skill sets to strengthen the team, and because of that we just picked up a designer. Her name is Andrea Acevedo, she was at one of the BigApps events looking for a team to join. She’s an amazing graphic designer and we’re excited to have her on board! Our web app is about to get way more attractive.
Hardware Team
We recruited Daniel Kronovet and Harold Cooper to help us get the hardware cost down. If we can build our own hardware rather than using twines, we can cut the price per sensor down to about $20 - $40, rather than $125. Since we know we want to be able to offer the sensors free of charge, getting the cost down is going to be really important moving forward.
Daniel graduated with us from the Flatiron School and did a pretty cool hardware project that involved devising a system to detect when we needed to make more coffee in the communal coffee maker. He’s really excited about the project and we’re happy to have him helping out.
Harold is a friend of a friend who works at a hardware startup called Ringly, building software that talks to smart jewelry. He’s been in tech longer than everyone else on the team combined, so we’re super lucky to have him. Both Daniel and Harold have skills we desperately need, and we’re very excited that they’ll be working with us.
Going to NYCBigApps
The dean of the Flatiron School asked us to enter the NYCBigApps competition. They think we actually have a pretty good shot at winning, which would be amazing. The prize money would be enough to buy a lot of sensors for people who need them. We should really look at getting the cost down so we can have a bigger impact.
Huge win at NYTM
Everyone loved us at New York Tech Meetup - there are people coming out of the woodwork asking to help out with the project. We got so many business cards we don’t even know what to do with them. It’s crazy how this went from a school project to a serious piece of open source software almost by accident. The fact that the community is so excited about it really speaks to the need for more innovators out there designing tech solutions for community problems. Hacktivism, digital advocacy, whatever you want to call it - we’re really excited to be a part of it and using our tech skills to improve lives.
New York Tech Meetup
We’ve been selected to present at the largest meetup in the world! Crazy. We only had one day’s notice so we’ve got to really cram for this presentation. Looks like we’ll be spending the entire day going over the demo; it’s crazy to think that thousands of people will be seeing this.
BetaNYC
We got approved to present at BetaNYC! They want us to do a 5 minute lightning talk, so we’ll have to cut out about two thirds of the presentation, but it’s still super exciting. BetaNYC is a perfect place to present because its specifically focused on technology, civic engagement, and community service. You can read more about their other awesome projects here.
Continuous Deployment
Now that we’ve got deployment mastered, we thought it would be good to set up continuous deployment. William connected our repo to CodeShip and now any time we push to master it redeploys so long as our test suite passes. It’s been great.
Deployment!
We finally deployed! We gave up on figuring out multipacks and deployed to Digital Ocean instead of Heroku. It took a whole day and lots of advice. But now there are no more missing readings due to William’s computer being down. Major progress.
Presentation went well!
Our presentation went really well! It got such a good reception in fact that the dean of the school told us to apply to present it at New York Tech Meetup. It’s the largest meetup in the world and has a huge audience, so I’m sure we won’t get in, but we might be able to get into some smaller meetups. We’re also going to apply to present at BetaNYC. Wish us luck!
Bootstrap Makeover
Tristan’s been pounding away at the UI. He taught himself Bootstrap and has been getting help from Jon Grover, the front-end instructor at the Flatiron School. The app is starting to look pretty nice actually, and he’s got some fancy AJAX and client side javascript to make things sleek.
Custom Authorization
We decided to hand-roll our own authorization system instead of going with an off-the-shelf library like CanCan. Thanks to Avi Flombaum, dean of the Flatiron School, for the advice! We’ve also updated the architecture of the application to create database relationships between tenants and their advocates, like lawyers and tenant union organizers.
Devise Authentication
Tristan somehow managed to set up our authentication system, which is now actually really robust. We’re really concerned about protecting user privacy so this was a big accomplishment for us. We’re using Devise, which is an open source library from Plataformatec. It’s pretty complicated but once Tristan got it up it was great.
Vernaline’s Building
We finally got into the building in Crown Heights that the Urban Justice Center has been representing in housing court, and we were able to meet some of the tenants who live there. It’s incredible what they’ve had to put up with. After reading the New York Times article about them, we were really eager to help.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/nyregion/for-some-tenants-only-thing-heating-up-is-a-temper.html
SuperMechanical API is SuperLame
We are trying to move away from using Capybara to scrape the SuperMechanical site so we don’t have to figure out multipacks on Heroku. You’d think an API for a heat sensor would let you ask it for the temperature, but for some reason they haven’t gotten around to that feature. I even contacted them and they said they are not implementing that functionality any time soon. Without a workable API, it looks like we’re back to figuring out multipacks.
Urban Justice Center
Today we got in touch with Stephanie Rudolph from the Urban Justice Center. She and other lawyers at UJC often represent tenants in low-income housing who have no heat. You can read more about the Urban Justice Center below:
The Urban Justice Center serves New York City’s most vulnerable residents through a combination of direct legal service, systemic advocacy, community education and political organizing. Our 10 Projects assist clients on numerous levels, from one-on-one legal advice in soup kitchens, to filing class action lawsuits to bring about systemic change, to pushing social justice legislation forward.
Stephanie is really excited about our project and has two new users for us. She asked for more, but we’ve only got two sensors available for now. We’re hoping that by working with UJC, we’ll be able to better understand the housing court system and how heating code violations are lodged and resolved in court. If Stephanie can advise us on the best way to make our app and sensors user-friendly to tenants and lawyers, we can tailor our temperature logs to look like the ones people submit in court. We’re really excited about the partnership and look forward to working with Stephanie!
Technology Is Power
Everyone who works in technology seems to be building things for the people who have money. I get it, they want to get paid. But if technology is power - more than ever these days - what will happen if we continue to build technology only for the rich?
Deployment Problems
William tried to get Heat Seek up on Heroku but it looks like we need a second buildpack. We’re using Capybara in production as part of the process of collecting readings, which requires PhantomJS, and that uses a separate buildpack. By default, Heroku only lets you have one, and we’re using it to run Rails. We need to figure out how to use multipacks.