Launch Event for Code for Boston MAPLE Project Next Week

On Thursday April 6, 2023 from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society will be hosting a discussion on “Digital Public Spaces for a Healthy Democracy: goals, values & aspirations”.

The event is timed to coincide with the public launch of a new tool called MAPLE that helps people to direct their perspectives, insights, and passions about societal issues to channels that influence public policy. Specifically, MAPLE (the Massachusetts Platform for Legislative Engagement) makes it easy for anyone to submit written testimony to the MA legislature, and to see testimony written by others. MAPLE, has been built by a group of volunteer technologists at Code for Boston and has been incubated by Northeastern University’s NuLawLab. They are operating as a nonpartisan, open source, and nonprofit (501c3) project operating under Open Collective and supported by Partners in Democracy.

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Kagi is the First Good Alternative to Google

A friend recommended I try Kagi and I am impressed. I have previously tried search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo and have found them lacking. I have always returned to Google. I am not feeling the same pull with Kagi.

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DevUtils Gives You All Your Handy Tools in One Package

When I started coding I would often have to convert and format things from one type to another. JSON would be scrunched together, dates would appear in weird “epoch time” format that meant nothing. So I was excited to discover DevUtils which takes many of the websites I found and later command line tools and aggregates them into one handy app.

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How poorly AWS is documented

AWS is one of the largest cloud platforms and we use it for our projects at Code for Boston. I spent this morning trying to figure out how to view logs from the past day on a project and boy was it a challenge.

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Weekend Links

This work by Matt Zagaja is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.