Unlikely People in Civic Tech!
April 13th, 2022
Greetings Civic Hackers!
It is Nhi [n-yee]. (Matt is away at the moment.) I am a non-coder, such as some of you who are product managers and the like. I help out in communications at Code for Boston. I graduated from a coding bootcamp at Harvard Extension School, but I don’t hard-code for a living. I’ve been using my beginner’s knowledge of full stack web development to manage web-based/SAAS projects and create/maintain basic websites. There is a slight misconception that Code for Boston consists of only developers and that those developers are of a specific demographic. That is not true here nor out there. All tech projects require both code and non-code roles to function properly and those roles are filled by people from all walks of life and demographics.
For example, our very own Annie LaCourt in our leadership team is an avid weight lifter. When she’s not working at her day job or leading on Mattapan Mapping, she’s dead-lifting 280 pounds at the gym.
What’s your hobby outside of civic tech?
Job Openings!
- Institute for Nonprofit Practice is accepting applications for their fellowship/professional development programs and are offering tuition subsidies up to 100% for anyone who needs one.
- Cortico is hiring for an Engineering Team Lead!
- Paychex is hiring for 20+ engineering roles and more!
- Work at CharlieHealth to reduce teenage suicide rates!
Events:
- April 13: Data Sharing and Platform Urbanism: Contested Digital Sovereignty in the Emergent ‘Smart City’
- April 14: Comms API Tech #10 - Boston with GitHub & Infobip Workshop & Networking.
- April 26: Suffolk’s Legal Innovation and Technology (LIT) Lab
-
April 20-21: [ODSC East 2022 Open Data Science Conference](https://odsc.com/boston/#register)
Project Updates
Clean Slate
- Massachusetts Recreational Consumer Council Wordpress site: Last week week started discussions about plugins, budget, and the “Take Action” page.
- Recently released version 4 of the testing framework
- Working on efiling needs for the testing framework, as well as bulk tests, and discussions on random input testing.
Police Data Trust
- Getting PR ready
- Scheduling date for user testing
Mattapan Mapping
- Design session
- Working through Mapbox timeline, interactive, etc
- Looking at react work, and some data transformation in backend
Legislative Testimony
- Going beta this week!
- All features developed!