Today is Earth Day; Devs can have an impact

jess

Jess Lee

Posted on April 22, 2020

Today is Earth Day; Devs can have an impact

The planet’s largest civic event was held on April 22, 1970 -- the very first Earth Day, kicking off the modern day environmental movement. In celebration of its 50th anniversary, we wanted to tell you all a bit about Sloan the sloth, our loving mascot.

Sloan has been with us since the Summer of 2017, working hard at moderating discussions and welcoming new users to the community. She has a pretty important job! On top of these responsibilities, Sloan also publishes posts for members who would like to remain anonymous while they seek advice from the community. You can check out some of her posts here:

Clearly, Sloan is not a lazy sloth -- she’s just slow moving, and being slow has actually helped sloths survive on this planet for almost 64 million years! It’s an incredible tactical strategy that us humans could probably practice every now and then. For those of you curious, Sloan is part of the Bradypodidae family of sloths. The main distinction between her family and the other sloth family, Megalonychidae, is that Sloan is three-fingered instead of two-fingered. While this distinction may seem minor, these two families of sloths carry very different lifestyles!

You can have an impact

Due to the impact of COVID-19, there has been an unprecedented decline in donations to animal conservation efforts. While the virus has caused global hardships, we cannot totally disengage with the ongoing need to support environmental efforts. If you are in a situation, as a software developer, where your employment situation has not been upended by the pandemic, we ask that you consider donating to a conservation foundation.

If you’d like to learn more about sloths, today’s your lucky day. We invited Dr. Rebecca Cliffe, Founder and Executive Director at The Sloth Conservatory Foundation to host a #watercooler AMA on DEV. Check it out here:

Here are some non-profit organizations to support:

Software developers can also make an impact writing code.

Here are some cool OSS projects to check out:

Sheltermanager.com

Sheltermanager.com is an open source solution for animal shelter and rescue group management:

GitHub logo sheltermanager / asm3

Animal Shelter Manager

Animal Shelter Manager v3 (sheltermanager3)

This program is covered by the terms of the GNU General Public Licence v3 See the file LICENSE in this directory for details.

As of version 45, ASM no longer supports Python 2.

Python >= 3.6 is required for f-string support.

Dependencies

If you are using a Debian-based system (eg: Ubuntu), then the following will install all the software you need to run ASM. If you are using the sheltermanager3 deb package it already has dependencies set for these and will install them for you.

  • apt-get install make python3 python3-cheroot python3-pil python3-mysqldb python3-psycopg2 python3-memcache

Extra, non-mandatory packages:

  • apt-get install imagemagick (for scaling/compressing PDFs to save on storage)
  • apt-get install wkhtmltopdf (for creating PDFs from HTML document templates)
  • apt-get install python3-xhtml2pdf (pure Python lib for creating PDFs from HTML document templates)
  • apt-get install python3-reportlab (for creating mailing label PDFs)
  • apt-get install python3-requests (needed for HTTP comms…

Public Lab

Public Lab is a community and a non-profit, democratizing science to address environmental issues that affect people:

GitHub logo publiclab / plots2

a collaborative knowledge-exchange platform in Rails; we welcome first-time contributors! 🎈

PublicLab.org

Code of Conduct Build Status first-timers-only-friendly Join the chat at https://publiclab.org/chat Code Climate codecov View performance data on Skylight Newcomers welcome GitHub license Gitpod Ready-to-Code

The content management system for the Public Lab research community, the plots2 web application is a combination of a group research blog -what we call "research notes"-and a wiki. Read more about the data model here.

Begin running (and contributing to) this codebase immediately with GitPod:

Open in Gitpod

It showcases a variety of features that help the Public Lab community collaborate on environmental technology, design, documentation, and community organizing. Originally a Drupal site, it was rewritten in 2012 with Ruby on Rails and has since extended but not yet entirely replaced the legacy Drupal data model and database design. We ❤️ Open Source and actively participate in various OSS programs such as Google Summer of Code(GSoC), Rails Girls Summer of Code (RGSoC), Outreachy, and Google Code-In (GCI) Some key features include:

Moja Global

Moja Global provides tools for estimating emissions and removals of greenhouse gases from the land sector:

GitHub logo moja-global / About_moja_global

About moja global and How We Work

All Contributors

moja global

This repository provides information about the moja global organization and its tools. You can find out who we are, what we do and most importantly, how we work and how you can contribute.

What is moja global?

moja global is a collaboration under the Linux Foundation that aims for the widest possible collaboration on and use of credible tools to better manage the land sector. The flagship software is the Full Lands Integration Tool (FLINT), a tool to estimate emissions and sinks of greenhouse gasses from forestry and agriculture.

Why moja global?

Climate change is the biggest challenge of our time. Globally, more than 25% of the greenhouse gasses emissions are caused by the land use, mainly agriculture and forestry. But plants are also the easiest way to take CO2 out of the atmosphere again. So while land use is now part of the problem, we want…

Climatescape

Climatescape is an open database of organizations leading the fight against climate change.

GitHub logo climatescape / climatescape.org

Discover the organizations solving climate change

Climatescape

Discover the organizations solving climate change

This is the source code behind climatescape.org, an open database of organizations leading the fight against climate change.

Developer Setup

Note: you need to be invited to our Airtable project to run this project locally. The process is really simple and we accept anyone who's interested in helping out. Simply fill out the Climatescape Contributor Application.

  1. Follow these steps to get the project installed on your local dev machine
    $ git clone https://github.com/climatescape/climatescape.org.git
    $ cd climatescape.org/site
    $ npm install
    Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
  2. Copy your Airtable API key from this page: Airtable account
  3. Create a .env.development file at the root of the project replacing YOUR_KEY_HERE by the key you copied in the previous step:
    $ cp .env.sample .env.development
    Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
  4. Run the project like so:
    $ npm run develop
    Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Bonus:

Want to preview changes on other devices?

Use the host option

$ npm run develop --
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Are there other organizations and projects that the community should be supporting? Let us know in the comments!

Happy Earth Day and Happy Coding!

💖 💪 🙅 🚩
jess
Jess Lee

Posted on April 22, 2020

Join Our Newsletter. No Spam, Only the good stuff.

Sign up to receive the latest update from our blog.

Related