I am not a carpenter. My occasional effort to build something, no matter how mundane, ends badly. That’s because carpentry is hard. There are a hundred ways to screw up, and ninety of them are only obvious in retrospect. I took shop class in middle school, so I’m generally comfortable with the tools of the …
Author Archives: Waldo Jaquith
Term-limiting your organization can be a gift to future you.
For just a great many mission-based organizations, there is some point in time at which it should have accomplished its mission. If it’s done that, then it should stop. And if it hasn’t accomplished its mission by then, it should still stop, because it’s apparently not able to get the job done. The landscape is littered with zombie non-profits that exist to …
Continue reading “Term-limiting your organization can be a gift to future you.”
How to get started with continuous integration.
I’ve put off learning to use continuous integration tools for a few years now. There’s never a good time to complicate my development process. But today I finally did it. It works differently than I thought, and was easier than I expected, so it’s worth documenting the process for others. I have a non-trivial number of GitHub …
Continue reading “How to get started with continuous integration.”
Shuttleworth fellowship.
I am very happy that, as of this week, my work at U.S. Open Data is funded entirely by the Shuttleworth Foundation. The South African organization has awarded me a one-year fellowship, which covers my salary and also provides up to $250,000 in project funding in that time. I’m very happy to have their support, and I’m excited about …
I am two dogs old.
Ado Annie Jaquith Capron October 20, 2001–August 26, 2015
“Accidental APIs”: Naming a design pattern.
Like many open data developers, I’m sick of scraping. Writing yet another script to extract data from thousands of pages of HTML is exhausting, made worse by the sneaking sense that I’m enabling the continuation of terrible information-sharing practices by government. Luckily, it’s becoming more common for government websites to create a sort of an …
Continue reading ““Accidental APIs”: Naming a design pattern.”
Dynamic electrical pricing demands dynamic price data.
The power industry has begun its long-anticipated shift towards demand-based pricing of electricity. Dominion Power, my electric company here in Virginia, has two basic rates: winter and summer. Although the math is a bit complicated, electricity costs about 50% more in the summer than in the winter, averaging 12¢ per kilowatt hour. (One can also pay for sustainably …
Continue reading “Dynamic electrical pricing demands dynamic price data.”
What’s wrong with Puckett’s resignation?
Further to the matter of Sen. Phil Puckett’s retirement, I want to play out the shades of inappropriateness here. While what he has done clearly feels wrong (allegedly quitting his seat in the Senate of Virginia in exchange for a job running a state-chartered organization and a judgeship for his daughter, all done immediately prior …
Ethics and tobacco meet again in Richmond.
This evening, the Washington Post’s Laura Vozella covered big political news: Republicans appear to have outmaneuvered Gov. Terry McAuliffe in a state budget standoff by persuading a Democratic senator to resign his seat, at least temporarily giving the GOP control of the chamber and possibly dooming the governor’s push to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care …
Continue reading “Ethics and tobacco meet again in Richmond.”
Opening up Virginia corporate data.
In Virginia, you can’t just get a list of all of the registered corporations. That’s not a thing. If you dig for a while on the State Corporation Commission’s website, you’ll find their “Business Entity Search,” where you can search for a business by name. But if you want to get a list of all …