Category Archives: Community Resources

2016 Wilkinsburg Vacant Home Tour Planning Meeting

One of the most popular posts here on the blog last spring was about the Wilkinsburg Vacant Home Tour. Blogger Ray Bowman wrote a recap of his visit to the tour here.

I was able to stop by and check out a few of the houses featured on the tour, I was on the fence about the idea of bringing a bunch of people to see vacant homes in Wilkinsburg. I was impressed with many of the efforts behind this event and the amount of history that was shared on each of the properties.

The planning meeting for the 2016 Wilkinsburg Vacant Home Tour is on Thursday, March 3rd from 6-8pm at the PHLF Resource Center located at 744 Rebecca Avenue in Wilkinsburg. 

vacant-home-tour-planning meeting

Historic Preservation & Building Reuse in Pittsburgh

Interested in historic preservation in Pittsburgh? Here are some other links worth a look…

 

 

Get Started Programming With Code & Supply

This Saturday, at 1PM, Pittsburgh technology community Code & Supply invites you to their latest installment of their #StarterSeries. Their #StarterSeries project promotes basic programming and coding literacy and encourages everyone to code. Their hope is to grow the Pittsburgh technology community, not just by making it attractive to existing developers, but by teaching Pittsburghers how to be great software developers.

MVC Diagram (Model-View-Controller)
This month’s installment expects a basic familiarity with programming. They intend to explore the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern and the fundamentals of Object-Oriented-Programming (OOP). MVC and OOP combined are the basis of nearly every program and application you interact with, and this is a great opportunity for aspiring programmers to learn the basics.

To keep up to date with the #StarterSeries and all of Code & Supply’s other events, join their meetup group.

 

http://www.meetup.com/Pittsburgh-Code-Supply/events/221470479/

kinograph

Techburgh: Show and Tell with Code & Supply

This Monday, local Pittsburgh software community, Code & Supply gathered some of their best and brightest in the old Paramount Film Exchange (now a co-working space) to show off what they’re working on.

Matthew Beatty (@beattyml1) gave the developers a tour of his code generation suite called “Codgen“. This little library lets programmers speed up ShowAndTell211their development by helping them generate the same basic code architectures in a way that works on Android, iOS, the web, and anywhere else a developer wants to target, without forcing them to rewrite the same code again and again.

On the softer skills side, Marie Markwell (@duckinator) shared her new blog project, Inatri. Businesses gather personal inforShowAndTell212mation and interact with the public in ways that can rapidly become problematic. After a personal disaster involving her private information being abused to harass her, and interactions with businesses which misgendered her, Marie decided enough was enough. She assembled Inatri as a place where businesses could received guidance on how to gather personal information and use it in a way that respects and protects their users.

Her key point is that the personal biases and assumptions of developers can and does “leak” into the software they develop.

Matthew Elper (@kinographCC discovered a very different problem. While traveling in Jordan, he discovered thousands of film canisters of Jordanian cultural history- and no one knew what was on them or what how to preserve them. He put together his own home-made film digitizer, using off-the-shelf parts, and discovered lost footage of the previous king of Jordan- an act that drew the attention of the current king.

ShowAndTell213Digitizing film is expensive- it’s roughly $1,000 per reel, and standalone machines cost upwards of $250K. Small archives, universities, and libraries simply can’t do that, and so Matthew started the Kinograph project, an open-source platform that uses cutting edge computer-vision software, mixed with off the shelf (and sometimes 3D-printed) hardware. You can follow the instructable for the hardware (although Matt recommends holding off- he has a cheaper, easier to build version in the works), and the get the software from GitHub

His project’s been featured in Make Magazine, and he’s looking for collaborators who are passionate about saving cultural history before it’s forever lost.

Finally, Jackie Vesci (@JVesci) came with her startup project, Tagalong Tour. This project is a passion project among friends that offers walking tours of Pittsburgh, with audio guidance. They’re still experimenting with ShowAndTell214what makes a great tour, but they’ll help you “Meet the Neighbors” in East Liberty, find the highlights of public art in Downtown, or play the best pinball in Lawrenceville.

iPhone Screenshot 2They’re looking to expand their tours, and grow their user base- which is growing at roughly 10% a week. You can check them out at the next OpenStreets, where they’ll have a Karaoke booth, and you can download the app and try it out yourself.

It was a great night to see what’s going on in the Pittsburgh tech scene. If you want to get involved, join Code & Supply on Meetup to learn about these events. Their monthly Build Night is a great place to meet and network with technical folks, and if you’re not a technical person, don’t worry! They have a #StarterSeries event every month, which will get you started. The next one is July 25th, and will cover a key design pattern for building software.

Awesome Pittsburgh to Hold Office Hours on Sunday

Awesome-Pittsburgh-bannerIf you are interested in who in Pittsburgh is helping others to turn ideas into reality then one of the organizations that you need to know about is Awesome Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh needs more people coming up and trying out crazy ideas.  And I love Awesome Pittsburgh and the Awesome Foundation because they help people try out these ideas.  One of the major theories in the world of startups in the idea of Lean Entrepreneurship and MVP (minimum viable product).  How soon can you get your business to market to try the idea and get feedback.  I think that Awesome Pittsburgh grants bring a much needed support to help Pittsburghers get turn ideas in to actual projects.

For example, one of the amazing people I met last month on the Millennial Trains Project trip is Jennie Gottstein who has created an interesting project in San Francisco called Score.  I would love to see if we could bring Jennie and Score to Pittsburgh and I am certainly going to see if Awesome Pittsburgh can help make that idea a reality.  [By the way – Jennie is also the brains behind a zombie themed disaster preparedness game that would be great to bring to Pittsburgh too – be sure to follow her on Twitter @jettstein]

Learn More at the Awesome Pittsburgh Office Hours

So if you have an idea, or just the beginnings of an idea for something you would like to see in Pittsburgh – head over to Social at Bakery Square on Sunday to meet the Awesome Pittsburgh team and get some feedback on your idea and how to apply for an Awesome grant.

Awesome Pittsburgh Office Hours
Sunday, September 14th // 1:00pm – 3:00pm
Social, Bakery Square – 6425 Penn Ave, Larimer
No RSVP necessary

Some of the amazing projects that Awesome Pittsburgh has Already Supported

You can check out the whole list here – all are truely awesome.  But here are a few that you can check out to see what $1000 can do for the community

  • Smiles for Hilltop – helping local doctors test a program to provide dental care and prevention in the Hilltop neighborhoods.
  • ZipPitt – exploring a zipline for Pittsburgh
  • GLAD Bags for Foster Children – creating comfort bags for kids who are removed from a home to replace the trash bag which is what is currently used.

What is Awesome Pittsburgh?

The short answer – a group that gives out $1000 grants to great ideas

The long answer…

Awesome Pittsburgh is a chapter of the Awesome Foundation, a global network of people devoted to forwarding the interest of awesomeness in the universe.

The Awesome Foundation grants money – cold hard cash – to people or groups with brilliant ideas, with a new project getting funded each month by chapters around the world. Pittsburgh, already a hotbed of awesomeness, is brimming with smart, passionate, creative, crazy people. Awesome Pittsburgh is giving some of you $1000 to do something amazing. We want to hear the best ideas for making Pittsburgh stand out in the global economy, for connecting our communities, for celebrating art or technology, for making the city a better place to live, work, and play, or for simply surprising and delighting us and our fellow Pittsburghers.