As part of the conference I was also lucky enough to receive some encouragement, training, and offers for help from the established community of journalist-programmers. In return for their generous effort I promised myself that I would involve myself more in the community of journalists and developers.

In that spirit, I’m here to publicly evaluate my progress in the last two months — on Django, contributing, and showing my work.

Django and Python

In a thank-you email to Michelle Minkoff shortly after the conference, I said I would post to my blog about my plans for Django and what I would build first.

Well, I never wrote that post. I did tear into the tutorial offered on the Django website, but lost steam about halfway through. Eventually I finished the tutorial, but by the end I was phoning it in.

That was the disappointing extent of my Python work until this weekend, when I attended the daylong Intro To Python Workshop organized by PyLadies and ONA LA. I left the workshop feeling much more comfortable with the basics of writing Python code. And after a good discussion about Django with Katharine Jarmul I feel ready to try it again, with the goal of writing an app for posting about music I like (because I’m tired of giving that information to Facebook). Grade: hopeful.

Show your work

I’m happy that I’m making more use of my GitHub account, posting four new repositories in the last couple of months. On a related note, I’ve been trying to take the “show your work” mentality to my graduate thesis as much as such things allow through my Argumentation in journalism blog. I’ll turn my thesis in to the university in the next few weeks and soon afterwards post the whole thing to the blog. I’ve also kept the source files inside a Git repository, which I’m thinking about uploading to GitHub as well. Grade: not bad.

Next steps

Python and Django are the big targets on my list, specifically the music app. I might run into some Ruby, too.

Read a more complete description from the site below. If you can, please take a moment to visit lossesoflife.com, tell us what you think, and let your friends know about it.

People die in large groups around the world almost every day. Losses of Life’s fundamental assumption is that these deaths are noteworthy no matter where the victims lived. Because most mainstream news media do not follow that assumption, we want to fill in some of the gap.

We attempt to do so by listing incidents from the previous week in which more than five people died. Each incident receives the equal treatment–same font size, same structure–delineated only by the number of deaths involved.