Urban League Heat Pump Accelerator Week Three

August 24, 2022

Last night I reviewed the pull requests from the last week with the backend team. Each request contained eight fields from the City of Boston property assessment database. Doing this over screen share allowed us to review common pitfalls folks encountered: syntax errors, syntax inconsistencies, and distinguishing String v. Symbol types. I then showed them how to use a linter to check their code syntax automatically. Working with folks new to Ruby helped me appreciate all the things that I take for granted. We concluded by making a plan for next weeks tasks since I will be gone. Next week they are going to import the data into the app and begin making it accessible via the Internet.

The data analysis team spent their time working with Christopher Scranton from the Urban League to learn about the dataset. They discussed which features are important indicators of heat pump conversion candidacy for the Urban League. One of the team members spiked a map visualization of the data to help the team better understand it. Users and use cases were discussed and the conversation resulted in the next set of tasks for the team.

Finally, the app design team has begun an initial design for the home page. We have a Senior React Developer that is building the frontend in React with folks that know that framework. They will soon begin doing user research and building out the app interface.

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