Tech at Ona: What We Built in 2016
It’s been a big year for the Ona tech team! In this post, we look at what we built in 2016. Ona platform tech in 2016 In 2016 we added more new features to the Ona platform than in the previous two years combined. Here’s a run-down of select features we added to Ona in
Python Expose Meetup is coming to the Ona Kenya office in early December
If you enjoyed the last Python Expose Meetup, then you definitely can’t miss out on the next one on 3rd December in our Nairobi office. Join James Maringa and Frankie Onuonga for a lively discussion about: Comparisons between basic Python data structures — including looking at fundamental and semantic differences, internal implementation needs, costs of operations, and memory
Signing Git Commits Using Your GPG Key
For data collection projects we contribute code to, it’s in our best interest to verify the identity of contributors linked to us. The goal is to prevent situations like this totally plausible horror story, where Mike Gerwitz discovered a back door created by his account that he didn’t remember making. We realize signing Git commits using
Thanks for Attending the Python Expose at the Python Nairobi Meetup
A special thanks to everyone who attended the Python Expose at the Python Nairobi Meetup. The 4 hour session that took place at Ona’s Nairobi office had presentations from Dickson Ukang’a, Co-founder and Director of Engineering at Ona, Vitalis Shisoka, Software Developer at Echo-Mobile and Edoardo Biraghi, Director of Software Development at BRCK. The speakers kept the crowd
Working with Data in the Unix Shell
I recently gave a talk at a data science meetup organized by the good people at iHub Research, on using Unix shell tools to work with data. It was primarily a hands-on workshop, but the slides I prepared may be useful to those who couldn’t make it. You can find the presentation embedded below.
OpenSRP Nairobi technology sprint, take two!
In mid-March, Ona hosted the second OpenSRP engineering sprint, bringing engineers from around the world to Ona’s Nairobi office. Engineering partners from SID (Indonesia), mPower (Bangladesh), IHS (Pakistan), OpenMRS, ThoughtWorks and Jembi (South Africa) joined the sprint to enhance the user experience and performance of OpenSRP, an mHealth platform that empowers frontline health workers in developing countries to deliver more effective healthcare. Ona is the technology lead
Writing Python Code to Decide an Election
The long awaited video from Ona’s keynote presentation at PyConZA 2014. A while back Ona was given three weeks to write the software that will tally votes in the Libyan elections and decide who wins and who loses. This is not something we could get wrong. We combined agile development with best practices in testing
Automating Style In Clojure
We do everything we can to improve code quality. Our process includes rigorous code reviews focused on getting the correct level of abstraction, modularity, and reusability. We quickly realized that nitpicking code format and line length was distracting us from our goals. It isn’t that those aspects aren’t important, but that they should be standardized
Squashing Commits with an Interactive Git Rebase
There are plenty of reasons to get familiar with and start using git’s interactive rebase. You might want to edit a commit message, delete commits, reorder commits, or edit commits. Here we will talk about using it to “squash” (as in combine, merge, or meld) multiple commits into a single commit. In our specific use case,
Clojure Destructuring Gotcha!
Given the following function definition, what would you expect to happen if you ran (hello :person nil)? (defn hello [& {:keys [person] :or {person "Rich"}}] (str "Hello, " person)) (hello) => "Hello, Rich" (hello :person "Hickey") => "Hello, Hickey" (hello :person nil) => "Hello, " I’d have expected (hello :person nil) to have the same result as calling (hello),