Week notes #5

Yes, there is a missing week. I totally fell off the wagon last weekend, and it felt extremely dishonest to retroactively add a weeknotes #4 in.

So, what's been keeping me busy?

More investigation into definitions of green power for the green project

Open sourcing code is one thing. It's possible to read licences, and open data licenses, and all that.

But understanding all the definitions of green power and having reliable definitions, and finding a way to make it intelligible to people who don't have the time to understand energy markets is really complicated.

The thing is, without making this information digestible and correct, it's difficult to defend the decisions when you have an automated or even semi automated service giving people green or not-green statuses for the infrastructure they use.

That said, it's getting clearer.

Writing scripts for infrastructure

I didn't expect to when I started on this gig, but I'm writing ansible scripts again, for stuff like incremental backups, and getting data safely offsite, where it can be recombined for analysis, or for cutting releases for publishing as open data.

Getting support and interest for an climate and tech themed unconference in Berlin in May

You can read more about this in a separate post. I'm pretty excited about this now.

Writing funding apps

I'm funded on the prototype fund until August, and the next funding round theme, commit system is one I'm absurdly excited about, so I've been hustling like crazy to find people who might be up for working with me on future rounds to work in areas where I think there's scope to build some useful things, which either complement what I'm working on, or make it it possible for new things to be created.

One is taking the thousands of peer reviewed environmental datasets from a company I used to work at, and because they're written in javascript, make them easy to run anywhere you can run javascript.

Why is this cool?

Well, if you can do this, it means you can make data easy to explore in notebook contexts, or spreadsheets, or cloud servers, but it also means you can take the same models, and in ideally compile them down to run in an arduino or 5 EUR raspberry pi. You can embed environmental intelligence anywhere you can run javascript.

I'll write about the others in more detail this week, as it's 12:36 am, and I'm trying to get to sleep earlier during the week now.

Turning 37

Oh yeah, that too.