Newsletter: San Francisco hack night, new features, and more

2014-06-12T04:34:45Z

Posted by: alexbayleaf

Originally published at Growstuff Blog. You can comment here or there.

We’ve had some busy times over the last few months, and thought it was time to bring you up to speed on what’s been going on with Growstuff since we last sent out a newsletter, as well as what’s coming up.

Growstuff Hack Night in San Francisco, Wednesday June 18th

First of all, a quick note to those of you in the San Francisco Bay Area — we’re holding a hack night on the 18th, for anyone who’d like to help improve Growstuff, or build stuff with Growstuff’s API or open data.

What’s a hack night? It’s an evening when we get together to build and make stuff in a hands-on way. It’s participatory, fast-paced, and fun.

It’s for developers, designers, data geeks, or anyone at all who’s interested. No experience necessary — we can pair you up with someone or teach you, or if you know about growing food and are happy to talk about how you do it, we can definitely use that expertise!

Interested? Find out more information on the Growstuff Blog.

We’ll be in Portland at the end of June

Skud will be attending AdaCamp and Open Source Bridge in June, so make sure to say “hi” if you’re going to be there!

New features on the site

We’ve recently added a handful of new stuff to the site, including:

Crop search! This much anticipated feature makes it easy to find crops from wherever you are on the site. Try it out.
Roots and tubers: you can now plant vegetables such as potatoes from “root/tuber”, which was previously missing from the list. Thanks to one of our newest volunteer developers, Maco, for this improvement :)
We’ve replaced our maps. The old map provider stopped offering services to smaller websites, so we’ve switched to Mapbox. We apologise for the short period when the map on our Places page was out of action.
New crops: some of our recently added crops include Good King Henry, several varieties of kiwifruit, hazelnut, snap pea, cowpea, and
romaine lettuce. If you find crops missing and would like them added you can request them here.

3000 Acres

Over the past few months, Skud has been working on another open source food-growing website based partly on Growstuff’s code. Check out 3000 Acres, which is helping residents of Melbourne, Australia find vacant land to grow food, and build communities to grow it with.

Since the two projects share an open source license, Growstuff also benefits by being able to re-use some of the code from 3000 Acres, so you can look forward to us picking up a few new features from them, as well.

That’s all, folks!

Stay in touch by following us on Twitter — we love to hear feedback and suggestions any time.

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Growstuff Hack Night in San Francisco

2014-06-12T04:03:33Z

Posted by: alexbayleaf

Originally published at Growstuff Blog. You can comment here or there.

Are you in the San Francisco Bay Area next week? I’m visiting town for a bit and the fab people at Double Union feminist hacker/maker space are hosting a Growstuff Hack Night for us.

When: Wednesday June 18th, 2014, 6:30-10pm

Where: Double Union, 4th floor, 333 Valencia St, in the Mission District. More info here.

Who: Anyone interested in building open source software for food growers! New developers and non-developers welcome; we’re happy to teach, pair you with someone more experienced, or help you find a non-coding project to work on.

Food: We’ll order food that fits the dietary needs of folks who come (veg*n, gluten free, etc).

There are heaps of things to work on, but some possibilities include:

Extending our crops database to include even more forms of edible plants (we need researchers and data entry folks for this!)
Displaying more visual data about how and where things are grown, including maps and charts (designers! front-end folks!)
Adding features like wishlists, email notifications, better social features, or better seed swapping.
Improving accessibility and/or responsive features.
Using the Growstuff API to build apps, plugins for other software, or other cool toys.
Analysing the data available so far from Growstuff’s gardeners, to understand how food is being grown around the world.

For those of you hoping to hack on the Growstuff code itself, you’ll need to set up your development environment. If you’d like a hand with this, ahead of the hack night itself, we’ll be at DU tomorrow night too (Thursday, June 12th) from 6:30pm and are happy to give you a hand. Or drop Skud an email at skud@growstuff.org or drop in to #growstuff on Freenode IRC any time.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Skud