OK, technically it was last week in Growstuff, but I took the weekend off so you’re having it on Monday instead. So here’s a roundup of what’s interesting in the world of Growstuff over the last week, ish.
Growstuff gatherings
Growstuff developers Shiho, Taylor and Maki with gardeners Sheilagh and Ben, during our tour of Ballarat Community Garden last weekend.
Hackstuff Ballarat went really well! We visited three gardens including a private veggie garden established two years ago, a community garden, and a second private garden that’s been established more than twenty years. We asked questions and took notes about how each garden is organised, how they track information, and more. Then we adjourned to work on some code, including better crop search and a redesigned homepage. You can see a bunch of photos on the discussion page for the event. We’d like to organise similar garden tours in other cities!
This coming week we’ll be at Open Knowledge Workshop in Melbourne, Australia, talking about Growstuff and open food data. Come join us!
Development news
We’re working towards Release 8 which means an update to the Growstuff website with new features in a couple of weeks’ time. See the link above to find out what’s coming down the pipe.
Some of the latest features we’re testing include adding photos for gardens, and improved crop search (looks for alternate names and scientific names, as well as the main name). You can see these on our staging site, or join in our testing discussions, particularly this thread for the features mentioned.
We also seem to be converging on using React.js for frontend/UI improvements. We’re going to experiment a little with it and see how it fits into our code and workflow. Got opinions? Discuss them here.
Over on Github we have a heap of recent pull requests and everyone’s been really active. We’ve recently been encouraging people to post pull requests for works in progress (WIPs) and it’s working really well for us to discuss how to do things. Special props to Marlena for her amazing work on histograms for planting advice — this is an inspiration for the rest of us for quality of code!
Part of the crop page wireframes. see more.
Finally, Skud posted some wireframes (i.e. rough sketches) for what the crop detail page might look like in the future, with lots of information on growing different crops, gleaned from our members’ data. Take a look at the discussion and let us know what you think.
From around the web
- An inspiring video about the changes effected by Vancouver’s food policy (Vancitybuzz)
- Save the bees, or people will go hungry! (Takepart)
- How to create a woodland where everything is edible (Financial Times)
- Radical farmers use fresh food to fight racial injustice (Citizen:Modern)
- Have we reached Peak Food? Shortages loom as global production rates slow. (The Independent)
- Bhutan could be the world’s first wholly organic nation within a decade (The Guardian)
We’re looking for a volunteer to regularly curate “This week in Growstuff”. Check out the job description and drop us a line if you’re interested!
