For a few years now, people have said “but you don’t just do scraping, and you’re not a wiki, why are you called that?” We’re pleased to announce that we have finally renamed our company. We’re now called The Sensible Code Company. Or just Sensible Code, if you’re friends! We design and sell products that […]
Remote working at ScraperWiki
We’ve just posted our first job advert for a remote worker. Take a look, especially if you’re a programmer. Throughout ScraperWiki’s history, we’ve had some staff working remotely – one for a while as far away as New York! Sometimes staff have had to move away for other reasons, and have continued to work for […]
QuickCode is the new name for ScraperWiki (the product)
Our original browser coding product, ScraperWiki, is being reborn. We’re pleased to announce it is now called QuickCode. We’ve found that the most popular use for QuickCode is to increase coding skills in numerate staff, while solving operational data problems. What does that mean? I’ll give two examples. Department for Communities and Local Government run […]
Learning to code bots at ONS
The Office for National Statistics releases over 600 national statistics every year. They came to ScraperWiki to help improve their backend processing, so they could build a more usable web interface for people to download data. We created an on-premises environment where their numerate staff learnt a minimal amount of coding, and now create short […]
Running a code club at DCLG
The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has to track activity across more than 500 local authorities and countless other agencies. They needed a better way to handle this diversity and complexity of data, so decided to use ScraperWiki to run a club to train staff to code. Martin Waudby, data specialist, said: I […]
Highlights of 3 years of making an AI newsreader
We’ve spent three years working on a research and commercialisation project making natural language processing software to reconstruct chains of events from news stories, representing them as linked data. If you haven’t heard of Newsreader before, our one year in blog post is a good place to start. We recently had our final meeting in […]
Saving time with GOV.UK design standards
While building the Civil Service People Survey (CSPS) site, ScraperWiki had to deal with the complexities of suppressing data to avoid privacy leaks and making technology to process tens of millions of rows in a fraction of a second. We didn’t also have time to spend on basic web design. Luckily the Government’s Resources for designers, […]
Open Data Camp 2
I’m back from Open Data Camp 2; and I’m finding it difficult to make a coherent whole of it all. Perhaps it’s the nature of the lack of structure of an un-conference. Maybe the different stakeholders in the open data community throughout the various hierarchies have a common aim but different levers to pull: the […]
6 lessons from sharing humanitarian data
This post is a write-up of the talk I gave at Strata London in May 2015 called “Sharing humanitarian data at the United Nations“. You can find the slides on that page. The Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) is an unusual data hub. It’s made by the UN, and is successfully used by agencies, NGOs, companies, […]
GOV.UK – Contracts Finder… £1billion worth of carrots!
This post is about the government Contracts Finder website. This site has been created with a view to helping SMEs win government business by providing a “one-stop-shop” for public sector contracts. Government has been doing some great work transitioning their departments to GOV.UK and giving a range of online services a makeover. We’ve been involved […]