Making A Difference Through Software With Eric Schles

Summary Software development is a skill that can create value and reduce drudgery in a wide variety of contexts. Sometimes the causes that are most in need of software expertise are also the least able to pay for it. By volunteering our time and abilities to causes that we believe in, we can help make a tangible difference in the world. In this episode Eric Schles describes his experiences working on social justice initiatives and the types of work that proved to be the most helpful to the groups that he was working with. Preface Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. When you’re ready to launch your next app you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to scale up. Go to podcastinit.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. To get worry-free releases download GoCD, the open source continous delivery server built by Thoughworks. You can use their pipeline modeling and value stream map to build, control and monitor every step from commit to deployment in one place. And with their new Kubernetes integration it’s even easier to deploy and scale your build agents. Go to podcastinit.com/gocd to learn more about their professional support services and enterprise add-ons. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, and read the show notes. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions I would love to hear them. You can reach me on Twitter at @Podcast__init__ or email hosts@podcastinit.com) To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media. Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Eric Schles about how to get involved with social justice causes as an engineer Interview Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? What are some ways that engineers can create real-world impact with their skills? What are some of the common roadblocks to contribution that people should be aware of? What are some of the types of projects or tools that can provide the most value compared to the amount of effort? Do you have any advice for picking an organization or cause that will benefit the most from technical expertise? Many of the tools and systems that get built for public or non-profit organizations require some amount of data for them to be useful. Do you have any advice on methods for identifying, locating, or collecting the necessary information for feeding into these projects? What are some of the design factors that should be considered when building tools for these organizations to allow them to be maintainable and sustainable in the absense of an experienced engineer? Keep In Touch EricSchles on GitHub @EricSchles on Twitter Picks Tobias Shoes without laces Eric Catboost Pomegranate Links USDS 18F OCW Python Course SAS R Machine Learning Version Control GitHub Agile OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Eric Schles Interview On Podcast.__init__ Excel ETL (Extract Transform Load) Automate The Boring Stuff Web Scraping Thomas Levine Elasticsearch Trello The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA