Ever heard of the Joel Test? It’s a simple 12 question measure of the quality of a software team, introduced by Joel Spolsky of Stack Overflow and Trello fame. The test is famous in the software development community as a no-BS calculation of the maturity of a development team. So, how’d we do?

I’m a self-diagnosed data nerd. For me, there’s nothing like trying to make sense of a phenomenon by looking at data, exploring an uncharted dataset to uncover insights. Sure, I don’t expect everyone to be as excited as I am about the release of the latest seasonally adjusted chain-volume GDP – but I do think that basic data literacy is becoming a vital part of running a successful business, or being an informed citizen.

In New Zealand and the rest of the world, the trend has always leaned towards siloing data in an organisation’s information system. These obscure spreadsheets are now in the public eye, and it’s time to make this data accessible to a larger audience so they can visualise it, analyse it, and explore it, all in the open.

We’re going to look at all the steps of this process in a series of blog posts, starting with an exploration of uncharted datasets to reveal their potential.

Here are guidelines I wrote on how to (not) use forks of dependencies in the context of JavaScript projects.

Springload often attends development sprints of Wagtail. They’re a great occasion to meet with other core contributors, and drive the project together towards the needs of its users, aka our clients. In the past our work has taken us to Ede, Netherlands, and Cape Town but this time we headed North to Reykjavík, Iceland thanks to our friends at Overcast Software.

Disclaimer: this blog post contains a high amount of unreserved enthusiasm about Wagtail and its community.

A few months ago I attended a Wagtail development sprint, hosted by team Lukkien in the Netherlands. This made me realise the breadth of jobs Wagtail is used for, some very different from what we do with it here at Springload. It prompted me to create Awesome Wagtail, a curated list of useful (well, awesome) resources from the Wagtail community. If you haven’t heard of “awesome-*” lists before, they’re a recent alternative to wikis for open-source communities to curate resources collaboratively. Some of the most popular lists range from Node.js to JMeter, with Pokémon in the mix, too!

In the spirit of such a list, let’s have a look at what the Wagtail community is up to.