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About datahack:it! |
2013-06-08 13:29:16 -0700 |
Often young hackers, amateur programmers and programming newcomers need a helping hand. datahack:it aims to help with code snippets about open data formats! |
Due to my work for the Open Knowledge Foundation in Germany and my general interest in open government data, I attended to several open data hackathons during the last months. What I noticed was that there are many young hackers, amateur programmers and programming newcomers having great ideas for nice data visualizations or civic apps, but not yet well-engineered skills in working with open formats. This sometimes results in different kinds of frustration and a certain inability to complete a working prototype.
Often the problems (usually caused by a lack of experience) have a very basic nature. Common questions I stumbled upon had an easy to answer I/O background like How to transform CSV to JSON in Python?, How to parse HTML using Java? or How to load XML using JS?. While experts usually won't think about such fundamental things, answering those or similar questions costs raw beginners not just an considerable amount of time, but also a lot of their nerves.
For that reason I decided to set up datahack:it!, my very own programming tutorial and code snippet sharing project. The main idea behind the project is to provide some kind of a getting started guide, mainly focused on handling open data formats such as JSON, XML, HTML, CSV or YAML.
Furthermore, all of the explained code snippets can also be found on my personal Gist, where I not just share code, but also a few datasets I had to work with in the past.
jbspeakr, June 2013