#immfa

[rebekahmonson]

Hacks/Hackers Miami Intermediate MySQL Meetup

Steph Rosenblatt, a former developer from the Miami Herald and current developer at gui.de, walked us through how to do basic data analysis and web application development with MySQL at the Sept. 22 Hacks/Hackers Miami meetup.  We started with a refresher on how to structure our tables using INT, ENUM, VARCHAR, CHAR, DATE, and TIME datatypes. We then used phpMyAdmin to query, compare and join datasets. We covered commands and functions including SUM, COUNT, MAX, MIN, SELECT, SELECT DISTINCT, WHERE, ORDER BY, GROUP BY and INNER JOIN.

This meetup was a small group (5-6 people) and very hands-on. Whenever I start using MySQL in earnest, I think I'll have a much better grasp on syntax and functions as a result of this run-through and Steph's initial bootcamp. Steph's presentation will be available on slideshare.

[rebekahmonson]

Code for Miami Hack Night with guest Kent Brewster

Kent Brewster, a developer at Pinterest and a civic hacker did a Google Hangout with Code for Miami on Sept. 16 about his Profiling Atherton project. Kent covered a range of topics about why he was motivated to look into the police blotter data, scraping and cleaning the data, analyzing it, hosting the project on GitHub and the consequences of his work. 

Kent noticed that Atherton, the third most-expensive ZIP Code in America near his neighborhood in Menlo Park, was posting its police blotter on a Wordpress site. Atherton's blotter is often cited for its "first-world problems," and Kent thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at trends in it. He used Wget to scrape the site, cleaned and massaged the data into a large JSON object and started querying. 

Kent's analysis showed that the Atherton police were disproportionately citing, and in many cases impounding the vehicles of, Hispanic non-resident drivers. In fact, 175 of 182 drivers cited from February to July 2013 had Hispanic names, and only two Atherton residents were cited. Shortly after Kent posted Profiling Atherton, the police stopped providing open updates of the crime blotter online. They have since transitioned to a vendor solution that is much harder to read and to scrape.

Kent's passion about his community really shone through in our discussion. He believes that the tech community can be a great contributor to the social good by analyzing and working toward better access to civic data.