2012-02-09 Meeting Summary

[Rohit Patnaik]

Hello Everyone,

Februrary was a pretty low-key meeting, but we had five awesome talks:

Jay - JSON Validator: https://github.com/tsuraan/jsonvalidator
* Validates JSON (just like it says on the box)
* Schema looks like the data you're trying to validate against
* Can do optional attributes
* Can match against numbers, strings, and regular expressions
* Can check of invalid keys (e.g. throws an error if a key exists
that is not in the schema)
* Downside: doesn't list the key that was invalid, only the invalid data
* Proposed improvement: validate against arbitrary function, not
just regular expression

Ravi - Fabric: http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.3.4/index.html
* Fabric is an easy to use deployment tool
* Can also be used for basic system administration tasks
* Used as an alternative to Capistrano in this case
* Allows you to make changes to your application (e.g. set
debug/logging flags) according to the environment you're deploying to

Dan - PyCon: http://us.pycon.org
* PyCon is *the* Python conference
* Organized and run entirely by volunteers
* 3 parts
* Tutorials - learn Python and Python libraries from the people
who made them
* Talks - hear from Python experts and learn about the new
developments in Python
* Sprints - work on open source projects with Python experts
* Conclusion: PyCon is awesome, and you should all go next year :)

Ben - Collectd: http://collectd.org/ & Graphite: http://graphite.wikidot.com/
* Server monitoring and statistics collection
* Clean simple plugin interface for writing your own plugins
* Allows for almost-real time data collection (Clockwork is
capturing snapshots every 10 sec.)

Eric - Getting Transit Data from Metro Transit: http://mtransit.herokupapp.com
* Metro Transit has a JSONP interface now for transit data
* Unfortunately they don't publish a key mapping stop names to stop IDs
* http://datafinder.org has a lot of data sets, including the
mapping between transit stop names and the transit stop assignments
* Demo app uses Bootstrap and Heroku

Jobs:
* SparkWeave:
* C#/Unix developers (also possibly unicorns)
* Contact mko...@sparkweave.com
* Clockwork
* Good programmers that are willing to do PHP
* http://clockwork.net/jobs
* 8th Bridge
* Facebook commerce
* http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?m=npFjQhwZ&j=odJ8VfwJ
* http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?m=npFjQhwZ&j=o6J8VfwC

Thanks everyone,

Rohit Patnaik

[Ben Gartner]

Hey, I have a Metro Transit JSON app too! Mostly I cloned it on github and fixed it up, but I added a few features as well. Here it is if you are interested:

http://metrotransitapi2.appspot.com/ 

I also made a small frontend that I use from my phone because the official mobile site suuuuucks.

http://benjo.webfactional.com/neckstrip/stop/show/17922 

Not released by any means but feel free to use it if you find it useful.

[Eric Lee]

Cool, do you scrape the data as the original project did? As of Mid-Dec 2011 there is an official feed 'in review' from MetroTransit.org. Which is what the app running on Heroku is querying.

Details:

http://www.datafinder.org/metadata/NexTripAPI.htm

An example usage gist:

https://gist.github.com/1794249

When I have time I'll try to improve the search and mobile layout, Gregg and others put me on to a few alternatives to Bootstrap for mobile layouts yesterday.

[Ben Gartner]

Yes, I'm scraping. It's pretty brittle. I wil definitely look at the official feed next time I work on this. Thanks!