Ben Arthur Looper

Good morrow Fediverse, My name is Ben Looper, I'm a software engineer of five years currently living in Houston, TX...but not for much longer! My wife and I are moving up to Calgary, AB, and I'm taking the opportunity to make some positive changes in my life, one of the first being to write more. I have a few projects that my ADHD brain bounces between, and I want to begin fearlessly talking about them here, rather than verbal vomiting about them to whatever poor soul asks me about them. Maybe (hopefully) these smaller updates will cascade into longer, more detailed pieces, but for now I'll be very happy to just share bits and bites, and to engage with others on stuff they're working on. That last point specifically is what I'm most excited for - I don't have many people in my life that I can full-blown nerd out about this stuff with, and I really hope that I can find a community here to do that with. Thanks, and happy hacking 📎 #Introduction #NewHere #Homelab #SelfHosting #NixOS #Sysadmin #calgary

@datastory@mstdn.ca This is such a cool study that you’ve put together! As a soon-to-be Calgarian with an interest in city infrastructure and civil engineering, I really do find it mind blowing that you were able to piece all of this together as clearly and legibly as you have, it’s very inspiring. You mention your two primary data sources are ESA satellites, is that open source data? (This is well out of my domain, could be a dumb question but it’s so cool to me that those are where your data come from). Thanks for posting!

@datastory@mstdn.ca Wow great to know, I will definitely be checking that out, cheers! Now I did know about Calgary’s open data platform, but this is the first time I’ve seen it used out in the wild, very cool and clever usage of it for boundaries and community attributes. Out of curiosity - is this kind of work common for city planning? Do cities do this kind of research and make real decisions based on it?