One of the biggest perks of learning programming is being able to automate things that you otherwise would have to do manually. This is also true for data science: Whether in data collection, data analysis, reporting or visualization: there is always potential for automation! In the fourth Open Online Data Meetup (OODM)*, Yannik, Alex and Frie share in three 10-minute talks how they have used their data science skills in combination with other technologies such as AWS or Raspberry Pi's to automate things away that otherwise would be very cumbersome and repetitive to do manually. After the talks, there will be room for questions and your experiences with automating things.

We are looking forward to see you at the event! :)

The talks:

Using R and Datawrapper to automatically create charts for journalism (Yannik Buhl)

Yannik will show us how to create automated, interactive tables and charts that are ready to be embedded in a website using Datawrapper. He will introduce two R packages (one that helps to easily access weather data in Germany and one that allows to automatically update Datawrapper charts) and will show how to make a R script running on an AWS instance that finally does the job of automation.

About Yannik: Yannik works as an economics editor and data journalist in Stuttgart. He has been part of CorrelAid for several years, has participated in our newsanchor project and is responsible for our blog.

Automatically collecting rental bike locations with Python and AWS (Alexandra Kapp)

Alex will talk about how she used uberspace, cronjobs and Python to successfully collect and store thousands of geolocations of rental bikes in a Postgres database not only once, but every four minutes over several weeks. She will also share several lessons that she learned along the way of collecting, storing, handling and cleaning such a large amount of data.

About Alex: Alex works for the Mobility Institute in Berlin. At CorrelAid, she is co-leader of the CorrelAidX chapter Berlin and has been an active part of the core team over the last couple of years.

Saving money with a Raspberry Pi and programming skills (Frie Preu)

Frie will take you back to 2017: She will talk about how - back when CorrelAid's financial resources were a bit more scarce - she used a Raspberry Pi, R and Python to hack around the limitations of the free Mailchimp plan to make sure that new newsletter subscribers would get a welcome mail. She will also show how she used that same setup to collect daily data on newsletter subscriber count, facebook likes and twitter followers and store it in a database.

About Frie: Frie is the COO of CorrelAid but has been around as a volunteer since the beginning. Before starting to work full-time for CorrelAid, she regularly used her volunteering as an opportunity to try out new technologies and hack together things for CorrelAid.

* The Open Online Data Meetup (OODM) is an online-based meetup series which provides the space to share interesting insights and entertaining stories from the field of data science with other people from the community. OODM is organized by the CorrelAid Education Team together with CorrelAidX Bremen.