Helping Developers During A Pandemic
I was suffering from coronavirus at the same time I was coding our Covid-19 Timelapse dashboard, a developer blueprint to help our customers better understand and respond to the impact of the Covid-19 crisis. Wondering whether I would be tagged as {Recovered} or {Fatality} fundamentally changed my relationship to data and the code that makes it accessible.
Understanding the impact of external events on different industries is critical to our customers across multiple businesses. So with the help of our solution engineering team, I decided to build a solution pattern that would bring together data on the spread of the virus and news analytics to paint a picture of what was going on across those industries.
We started by choosing a simple stack (Dash & Flask). Then we sourced some reliable data (Johns Hopkins and Dow Jones) and ran it through sentiment and topic analysis using open source NLP libraries. While building a Mapbox module to visualize the number of cases it hit me: this fever makes me part of this dataset.
Developers translate data into experiences. It is those experiences that might as well be keeping me alive.
I realized three things during this process:
1. Reliable data is a must, not just a want
This sounds obvious, but in this environment, it is not always possible to access reliable data. This can be the difference between a good or a bad business (or life) decision. Regardless of the leadership, logic and tech applied, the maxim still applies: garbage in = garbage out. Meticulously maintained open source datasets like Johns Hopkins’, coupled with curated datasets like Dow Jones’s are both examples of reliable data that makes a difference.
2. Developers are more than builders, they are heroes
When I am building ETL pipelines or ML applications, sometimes the impact on the daily lives of users can be lost. The new cloud platform, the new algorithm and the Stack Overflow language rankings seem more interesting than wondering what decisions a politician will take when they see a graph that shows there is a problem.
Decisions wouldn’t be able to be made without the systems that help “see” what is hidden. Developers translate data into experiences. It is those experiences that might as well be keeping me alive.
3. Code sharing is caring
I have been building and selling software for over a decade, be it proprietary systems or customizations on top of existing platforms. Things keep on moving faster, and collaboration has become paramount to keeping up. Code sharing is the best way to do that. A two way creative communication is opened. Developers use the code and adapt it — we see what they build and learn.
Our Covid-19 Timelapse dashboard is just one of many solution patterns and documentation in the Dow Jones Developer Portal, which we hope make your dev life easier.
Dow Jones is no stranger to developers. See more on how the devs ethos runs in our blood from posts by Patrica Walsh on Becoming a Data Business, which explores Factiva Snapshots and Streams (our cloud-based API for text mining); as well as Pranav Patel on open sourcing our DevSecOps tool, Dow Jones Hammer.
We are always looking for new ways to equip our customers with the tools they need to answer their business’ questions. Stay tuned for more in this space.
