Blog

Derek Eder

Civic Tech Builder

I use data, build tools, and organize people in Chicago to democratize power. Read more »

DataMade
Founder and Partner

Chi Hack Night
Co-Founder and President Emeritus

Wanna talk? Email or message me on mastodon.

Note: I only post here occasionally. I do most of my writing on the DataMade blog and on Chi Hack Night blog.

Electrifying Our Old Oak Park Home #3: Appliances

Published on Aug 22, 2023
We’ve made the switch to being fully electric in our 100-year-old home! I’ll explain the final steps we took to electrify our home by replacing our stove, hot water heater, clothes dryer and car with electric equivalents. These upgrades allowed us to fully cut our gas usage and eliminate the last ~20% of emissions from our home.

Electrifying Our Old Oak Park Home #2: Heat Pumps

Published on May 6, 2023
We’ve made the switch from gas heating to heat pumps in our 100 year old home, and you can too. We’ll explain how we took a big step in fighting climate change while also lowering our utility bills and increasing the comfort of our home in the process.

Electrifying Our Old Oak Park Home #1: Going Solar

Published on Nov 1, 2022
We are in the process of electrifying our Oak Park home and completely eliminating all our household emissions. This post is an attempt to document our process as we go, with the hopes that it will inspire our neighbors to do the same and learn from our efforts.

Keeping Tabs on Your Local City Council with Councilmatic

Published on Jun 24, 2013
City councils shape nearly every aspect of city life, from what kind of canopy you can have on a storefront, to how much we pay in taxes, to the number of cops on the street. There's now an app for viewing all this legislative information: Councilmatic.

Preparing for the Google Fusion Tables SQL API Deprecation

Published on Jan 12, 2013
On January 14, 2013, Google will deprecate the SQL API for their Fusion Tables platform. This post is here to help developers prepare for it (or more likely, fix things after they break).

How Chicago Public Schools Succeeded with Open Source Software

Published on Nov 14, 2012
On August 17, 2012, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) launched a new version of their School Locator - an online map that helps parents find public schools for their kids. Unlike the map that came before it, this one is intuitive, easy to use, and took half the time to build. How was CPS able to accomplish this? By doing it in-house and using open source software.

Hello World! Setting up a Jekyll blog inside Sinatra

Published on Oct 29, 2012
I'm going meta on my first blog post: how to set up a Jekyll blog inside a Sinatra app. A few people have written on this topic, but I had some specific requirements that no one addressed. So my goal here is to write the post I wish existed when I started out. Here it goes.