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For many years, I was a regular bike commuter. I worked about 5 miles from my house, and the bike route was largely along the levees of the Sacramento River. Sacramento affords year-round bike commuting weather, but it does have it moments. Like the time I rode into the office when it was 22 degrees F, or when it started raining right when I was planning on riding home.

It occurred to me that a simple twitter bot, that posted twice a day, could give me the temperature on the ride in, and the temperature on the way home. Heck I’m checking twitter a couple times a day, may as well get some useful info out of it…

So I created “BikeWxX”. X stands for the cities, currently San Francisco, Sacramento, Silicon Valley, and Portland. I find it to be super convenient, hope you find it useful.

Here’s the code. Grab it and make a tool for the bike commuters in your community.





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For my job as a bridge engineer, it is useful to have the most up-to-date information on bridges in California, Arizona, and Utah. Every year I download the latest bridge condition information compiled by the Federal government. This is a huge database of the detailed description, condition, use, and location of basically every bridge in the US. It’s pretty amazing.

I wrote some python scripts to parse out the data and get it into a PostGIS-enabled PostgreSQL database. From there I can do pretty much anything, like create cool maps of, say, all the bridges in the City of Los Angeles, with the poorest condition bridges in red.:

Or create a graphic of how many California bridges were built by year as the top image shows. Here’s the Plotly link.

If you know GIS and Python, take a look at my code. It works, but there are probably some improvements to be made.