Programmers Who Give A Sh*t

In episode #8, we talk with Chris Jensen who works at Raisely.com (a fundraising/CRM platform for charities) and is also one of the people behind the Do No Harm software license https://github.com/raisely/NoHarm We discuss some of the common concerns about licenses like NoHarm (and now there's the climate strike license https://github.com/climate-strike/license).

In episode 9, we talk to Joey Corea, a data scientist at Dataro (they help charities better connect with their donors using machine learning). Joey recently changed his career from being a QA engineer to a data scientist. When he's not wrangling data, he produces animal welfare themed colouring books. https://crazyabouthats.wordpress.com/2020/09/09/the-colouring-book-project/ A useful blog post from him on decision journalling: https://crazyabouthats.wordpress.com/2019/11/08/a-template-for-making-decisions/

Will Childs is a data scientist at Hello Sunday Morning, an Australian startup that aims to improve people's relationship with alcohol. They have a mobile app for problem drinkers that provides health coaching and peer support. Will talks about their treatment process, the experiments he's performing to find the most effective interventions for the HSM users and their technology stack.

Interview with Dan Lewis-Toakley, a web developer at Avaaz.org, the world's largest progressive campaigning organisation. We discuss Avaaz's theory of change, recent campaign victories, how they deal with campaigns spanning >10 languages and their migration away from a PHP monolith. Links mentioned: Campaigning related: - Live chat during Ebola crisis: https://secure.avaaz.org/en/ebola_volunteers_thank_you_3/ - Studies around clicktivism. Likelihood of action after signing petition is much higher. - The audacity to win: https://www.amazon.com/The-Audacity-to-Win/dp/B002VGERAU/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8 Tech Tools: - Email on Acid for email client compatibility testing: https://www.emailonacid.com/ - Framework/strategy for parallelising tests: https://opensource.zalando.com/zalenium/ Learning to code: - thinkful (programming training): https://www.thinkful.com/ - Coding blocks podcast: https://www.codingblocks.net/ - ThoughtWorks Tech Radar: https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/ Coding for good: - Progressive Coders Network: https://www.progcode.org/ - Spoke: P2P SMS service https://github.com/MoveOnOrg/Spoke Avaaz.org/hiring

Interview with Rachel Bunder, a data scientist at Solar Analytics. We discuss the importance of solar metering (e.g. 10% of unmonitored solar systems underperform by 50%), the potential for machine learning to match energy consumption with solar production, renewable energy policy, battery technology and much more. Links mentioned: http://www.minervacollective.org/

NB - audio a little choppy due to connectivity issues in Nairobi. Episode 4 with Bill Finn from Angaza, a pay as you go financing company that helps people in Kenya and 29 other countries around the world to pay for solar lighting and other equipment that would otherwise be unaffordable. The company started with the mission of displacing kerosene lamps which are expensive and dangerous (burns, toxic fumes). Now more than 2 million people have benefited from solar equipment financed through Angaza and the company is planning to grow much bigger. Bill discusses his journey from working at hedge funds to moving to Nairobi, Kenya to help build out Angaza's tech stack.

Episode #3 with Schalk and JD from https://www.OpenUp.org.za, a civic-tech consultancy in South Africa. We talk about https://vulekamali.gov.za an open data portal for government budgets that allows South Africans to see exactly where the taxes get spent. They massively upgraded the old system which consisted of PDF files on an unindexed web page. The new system uses CKAN (an open data platform) to make the data easily available and searchable. There are even APIs too. As well as their professional work with OpenUp, Schalk and JD also run civic-tech community events out of https://www.codebridge.org.za that have enabled interested people to jumpstart their ideas including local developers who investigated what led up to South Africa's water crisis.

Episode number two with Michael Manley from Public Good Software. We discuss Public Good's approach to making news actionable using machine learning to identify articles which are connected to the focus areas of charities. Public Good has been able to help a number of charities raise a ton of cash and even find kidneys for people in need of a donation. Summary of Michael's interview is here: https://gist.github.com/michaelsmanley/c1376b3ca40b430506f2393b8286bbb2 The book I was trying to remember is "Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology" by Kentaro Toyama. If you'd like to join the Programmers Who Give a Sh*t community, join us here: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/10359564 Show intro/outro music from Technical Debt by Metalogue: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Metalogue/Paroxysm_1926/Metalogue_-_Paroxysm_-_03_Technical_Debt

Our maiden podcast with G Klausner from Arcadia Power (https://www.arcadiapower.com/). Suggested resources: - 99 bottles of OOP by Sandi Metz: https://www.sandimetz.com/99bottles - Security Engineering by Ross Anderson: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html