I've been terrible at keeping this blog alive. Today, after 4 long years 😓 I finally found some time to write about a project I worked on last year (2024) with the fantastic team at the Open Knowledge Foundation.
In April 2024, I was hired to polish the front-end of the Open Data Editor, an open source tool for non-technical data practitioners to explore and detect errors in tables. This app serves mostly as an easier-to-use alternative to Open Refine focused on data cleaning and validation for tabular data (with a lot less features, the tradeoff being a much flatter learning curve and more pleasing-to-the-eye interface).
My responsibility in this project was to work closely with UX to adapt the designs of an already existing prototype. We were using Figma for the UX, ReactJS, Zustand for the store, Python for the backend in an Electron wrapper since this is a multi platform desktop app.
We had a pool of very talented people in our small team, comprised mostly by people from the Global South. You can read about our lovely team here. I am super happy with the result, from design and UX to programming and project management. I think we did a great job and I would have loved to stay working in this team had the project not come to an end.
The only thing I regret was not sending in a better picture. I had just bought a phone and sent the first picture I found in my gallery, a selfie I made the day before, so now I will be forever on the internet with this picture. But what's important is the project. 😩
You can download the Open Data Editor for Linux, Mac and Windows here. If you find a bug, you can also open issues on the github repo, since it's -of course my horse-, Free and Open Source. Isn't that super awesome?
That's it for this post. Now I'll plunge again into the darkness for another 4 years. Until the next post. 👋
