Code for Philly

Rebranded and redesigned, launching to production today amidst the COVID-19 pandemic which saw a 10x increase in traffic!

https://phillyfoodfinder.org

Getting a lot of requests for updating/improving the code. Need to consider more in-depth frameworks for testing python code and turning app script into modules. Experienced python developers - come thru!

Code for Philly set up a fork of the repository today to help manage incoming user and contributor interest: https://github.com/CodeForPhilly/chime

Major efforts in the new repository included:

• Setting up a documentation site and consolidating knowledge: https://codeforphilly.github.io/chime/
• Developing a kubernetes deployment: https://github.com/CodeForPhilly/chime/tree/master/k8s
• Deploying a pre-production version of the application to Linode's LKE managed kubernetes: http://lke.penn-chime.phl.io/

Next up

• Merge improvements from pennsignal's repository
• Expand documentation on how to test the Kubernetes deployment locally on minikube
• Automate building container and deploying to LKE on merge to master with GitHub Action workflow
• Add documentation on how local groups can set up their own production deployment

Chime is officially launched! See this tweet, and accompanying blog post for more details. The team is now focused on two things:

1. implementing features requested by government and medical system stakeholders
2. ensuring we can scale to support the traffic coming in

Help needed

In order to ensure the CHIME team can focus on modeling and interacting with stakeholders, we're looking for help filling the following roles:

• Project / product management: help with organizing the project. Help make sure that work around explaining and improving the CHIME dashboard is well organized. Help us document the project so volunteers can contribute.
• Devops: help ensure that the dashboard can handle the increase in traffic. Currently we are running on Heroku, but may switch to Linode, since they have provided free resources.

Snow-Capped has been paused due to legal concerns. There is an existing US Patent #10,115,155 titled "Multi-bureau credit file freeze and unfreeze," which is held by some Experian (one of the credit bureaus) executives. After talking to many, many lawyers, I decided I don't want to be sued into oblivion and will not be pursuing Snow-Capped's "one-click" freeze/unfreeze at this time. I've sunset the www.snow-capped.com site and want to thank all of my users and everyone at code for philly who helped me along the way. I am toying with the idea of creating a nice step-by-step freeze/unfreeze walkthrough, hosted at a new domain, www.snowcap.me. Since it's just a walkthrough, the guide won't capture any user data or require an account. I'll be talking to people to determine whether this idea is worth building - let me know your opinion!

After several discussions between PAWS and our wonderful Code for Philly volunteer team, coding is underway! The work is focused on building the initial infrastructure to host the data pipeline (setting up containers for the data processing scripts and for the database), as well as processing scripts to ingest data from 3 sources (donors, volunteers and adopters) and fuzzy-match them across the datasets. Additionally, we are setting up proof-of-concept APIs to allow end users to upload and download datasets. The current project focus and tasks can be found here.