"Twas the night before #hackforchange, when all through the house Not a keyboard was stirring, let alone a mouse. The datasets were loaded in their APIs with care, In hopes that developers soon would be there."
OK, now that I've embarrassed myself, time for introductions. I'm Chris Metcalf, Socrata's developer evangelist. I've been coordinating our efforts and those of our customers over the past weeks in preparation for this event and we're all super-pumped to be a part of it.
We've representatives supporting events in six different cities [1], but we obviously can't be everywhere. I wanted to send out a quick message to all the event organizers to make sure they know how to get support from our team this weekend.
If you're lucky enough to be in one of the below cities, you can track down a team member in person and they'll help straighten you out:
- Seattle: Will Pugh, Marc Millstone, Saf Rabah, Clare Zimmerman
- Chicago: Clint Tseng and Tyler Masterson
- Atlanta: Jordan Gilbertson, Steve Ellsworth, and Chris Metcalf (Me)
- Washington, DC: Marcus Louie, Hiko Naito, Joe Pringle
- New York City: Chris Whong
- San Francisco: Bridget Quigg
They'll be making themselves known and you can chase down one of their smiling faces with any questions.
If we're not at your event, don't fret. You can contact us in a number of ways:
- IRC: We'll be in the Freenode #ndoch room. Look for the people with "-socrata" nicks
- Twitter: @socrata and @chrismetcalf
- Our support portal: http://support.socrata.com
My contact info is also below if you want to contact me directly. I'm glad to help (although keep in mind I'm likely to be as busy as you are).
If you're lucky enough to be part of an event that has a community catalog on http://communities.socrata.com, you can find datasets your team has already loaded through that catalog. Chances are also pretty good that you may be in a city, county, or state for which we already host a Socrata data catalog - check out http://hackforchange.org/datasets or just ask and we'll help you track it down.
Once you've found your dataset, getting to its API is easy. If it's a Socrata Foundry API, you'll be taken directly to it's API documentation from the catalog. If it's a normal Socrata dataset, you can find the API endpoint under "Export" -> "API".
I've posted a bunch of useful resources online and I'll be updating them through the course of the event:
- Our developer portal: http://dev.socrata.com
- The kickoff presentation that I'll be using here in Atlanta and some of our team members will be using as well: http://socrata.github.io/presentations/hackathons/2013-06-01-ndoch/
- Our shared SODA Tips hackpad. I'll be updating this with tips and tricks throughout the day: https://hackpad.com/NDoCH-SODA-API-Tips-Tricks-1VdGDEYvMui
Our Github (https://github.com/socrata/) is full of helpful resources and libraries. In particular, I'd like to highlight:
- Our brand-spanking-new iOS library. It's fresh of the presses, but I'd love to have people try it out in beta: https://github.com/socrata/soda-ios-sdk
- Java: https://github.com/socrata/soda-java
- Scala: https://github.com/socrata/soda-scala
- Ruby: https://github.com/socrata/soda-ruby
Thanks everybody! Good luck with your events, and feel free to track us down if you need help.
Thanks,
Chris Metcalf Director of Product Development and Developer Evangelism
[email protected] (206) 745-6531 (direct) (734) 276-1100 (cell) http://www.socrata.com
[1] http://www.socrata.com/blog/live-blog-national-day-of-civic-hacking/