Safety in Numbers
Brighter Planet's blog
Cleanweb Hackathon NYC
We’re back from the Cleanweb Hackathon! It was a great weekend of meeting entrepreneurs in the clean tech space, joining forces with some of New York’s finest hackers, and hanging out at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications space.
Image credit: @greenskeptic, Instagram
Hacking
Andy, Seamus and I helped two teams write apps and help get others up and running with our CM1 API and public data.
I helped prototype an app, CleanGPA, which gives you a GPA-like score based on your home energy usage. We developed with Rails, and aside from a few hangups around OAuth, I was once again amazed at how fast you can build an app with tools like devise, formtastic. I’ve also been thrilled with the ease and speed of using faraday and vcr as tools to build clients against RESTful APIs.
Yoga & Juice
We also had the pleasure of sponsoring an hour-long yoga session. It was intense but energized me for the rest of the day. My abs are still a little sore!
After yoga, we enjoyed some cleansing juices from Liquiteria. I am a huge fan of ginger and these drinks really hit the spot.
The Apps
The winning apps were Econofy, an efficient appliance shopping guide and, NYCBldgs, a tool that highlights the best and worst-performing buildings in New York City. Econofy did a great job rating products on a five-point scale and helping to calculate money saved by projecting electricity costs. NYCBldgs put New York’s public building energy usage data to good use. I was amazed that the city was opening up so much useful data like this. It really goes a long way in helping us “clean tech hackers” get the job done.
What blog is this?
Safety in Numbers is Brighter Planet's blog about climate science, Ruby, Rails, data, transparency, and, well, us.
Who's behind this?
We're Brighter Planet, the world's leading computational sustainability platform.