Socrata was acquired by Tyler Technologies in 2018 and is now the Data and Insights division of Tyler. The platform is still powered by the same software formerly known as Socrata but you will see references to Data & Insights going forward.

Welcome (back) to our blog!

helenasw

helenasw

    Hey there! I’m Helena — I joined Tyler Technologies, Data and Insights Division (fka Socrata) about a year and a half ago. I’m a software engineer on the Performance team (as in the Socrata Performance Optimization product, not page performance). Over my tenure, I’ve been continuously impressed by all the cool things my peers do — both my coworkers and the customers that build on top of our products. I’ve also been continuously surprised that we don’t showcase our technical work anywhere. Since one of our core values is “Celebrate success together”, I’m here to do just that!

    Introducing dev.socrata.com/blog

    After a nearly 2-year hiatus, I’d like to re-introduce dev.socrata.com/blog! 🎉 As part of our re-launch, we’re also doing a little bit of re-focusing. In the past, this blog has been primarily a place for Socrata Open Data API announcements and technical how-to’s. Going forward, we’ll also be mixing in some behind-the-scenes cuts — how the team behind Socrata’s products builds the good stuff (and how we learn from the bad stuff).

    Here are some topics you can look forward to in the coming months:

    • Time Series Analysis with Jupyter Notebooks and Socrata
      Robert Voyer (Software Engineering Manager)

      Learn how to download the Seattle Building Permits dataset from the Socrata API, and do a time series analysis using open source data science tools in Python.

    • Informatics and Dogfood
      Andrew Deming (Software Support Team Lead) and Ryan Hall (Data Analyst)

      Informatics is how our employees use our own data and our own product on a daily basis. A grassroots initiative from the start, Informatics had several auxiliary goals, like onboarding new staff with the product and securely sharing data with internal and external stakeholders.

    • Jenkins Workers
      Joe Nunnelley (Senior Automation Engineer)

      Tyler’s Data and Insights Division uses Jenkins to execute automated jobs that support testing, builds, and deploys. Learn how we introduced CI/CD to our engineering process and how we started using Jenkins Workers to make this infrastructure more dynamic.

    Up next

    I’ll be facilitating this blog going forward, which means I’ll be doing the wrangling, but not the writing. Expect to hear from a variety of people and roles about all of the awesome work they do.

    PS: We’re hiring! If you’re interested in learning more about our work, then check out our jobs page.