Amtrak and Transit Data & Coding Meetup (Washington, DC)

[acelafan]

My fault for not posting this earlier...but if you are in the DC area and interested in coding and visualizing data about Amtrak, transit or other rail, come to the Transportation Techies Meetup Thursday August 30! It is being held from 6pm to 9pm near Washington Union Station.

We'll be discussing Amtrak Status Maps, the ASM archive database (ASMAD), and the transitdocs Better Track-A-Train.

Should be a fun night for anyone interested in coding and transit/train/Amtrak data. Feel free to stop by!

 

[Ryan]

This looks awesome, I think I have an evening meeting already that evening. I would love to hear more about both of those projects.

Some may remember that I coded up a stand-alone tool that did much of the work that ASMAD does, but never made it to distributing anything other than the results. Was a fun project to code up.

 

[Devil's Advocate]

Any chance this will be recorded and published somewhere?

 

[DCAKen]

I'll be there tomorrow!

 

[acelafan]

Glad to hear there is some interest! I can ask about recording, but I know the local group really tries to encourage live participation.

 

[DCAKen]

It was a fun gathering last night, What was really eye-opening was the amount of effort Sunny put in to de-obfuscating the code from Amtrak's Track a Train and the feed it uses. It makes the final result that much more impressive.

 

[daybeers]

Any update on a possible recording? So sad I don't live in DC anymore: I definitely would've gone!

 

[acelafan]

Any update on a possible recording? So sad I don't live in DC anymore: I definitely would've gone!

Sadly, no...if there is a 'next time' I'll give more notice for those in the local area. Sorry about that.

 

[Devil's Advocate]

This sounded like some very interesting and useful technical information. It's unfortunate that technology played such a small role in distributing the core knowledge to a wider audience.