Nick Doiron



Developing our world

My first real-world coding jobs were with One Laptop per Child in Uganda, Uruguay, and Haiti. Though we'd make changes if it were started today , at the time it was cutting edge, a learning experience, and deeply rewarding. In late 2012 / early 2013 I ran an OLPC teacher training program in the Marshall Islands.

Recently I'm interested in ML and NLP. I posted the first Hindi, Bangla, and Tamil models on HuggingFace, which have been used in multiple research papers. I am a co-author/contributor to Google's BIG-Bench Benchmark Project.

The best technology writes the future of your community

When I joined Code for America in 2012, no one was sure what civic hacking meant. I've continued to explore civic tech at the City of Boston (2013), Asia Foundation (2015-2016), and the MGGG Redistricting Lab (2019-2021).

Some of my most impactful team projects allowed people to plant sparkly trees on Google StreetView, see a 'Rap Genius' explanation of their district borders, or look up their local candidates and polling place in Myanmar's 2015 election.

this is where we get into technical details:

Open Source Hacker

Quantum Computing

Unicode and internationalization / localization

You couldn't use a computer if it displayed your language as little blocks. Open source developers have an opportunity to set the gold standard in supporting the world's languages and being open to accept new translations.

Mapping

Lots of maps:

Mote-0-Bike - sync'd map animation and sensor data



MajuroJS - custom neighborhood maps - stored 3.7MM buildings from 21 cities in MongoDB



Boston Greenery - custom Boston basemap using CartoCSS



Van Gogh Map - powered by MapBox's WebGL API - now with DIY version



Conferences & Mentoring

IAEA Nuclear Safeguards Summit, PyCon Zimbabwe, AI Village, maybe your event or class?

In recent years I have been trying to speak at more conferences and reach out to people in more parts of the world and in more industries beyond the web and tech startups. I have spoken at JSConf Iceland, NodeFest Japan, PyCaribbean, the Next Economy Summit, DEFCON's Crypto & Privacy Village, the Unicode Conference, Ignite events, and meetups.

I have some entry-level experience with mentoring fellows in Coding it Forward and encouraging friendly newbies to apply to get started in their own GitHub pull requests and conference talks.

One way which I can likely help is by answering questions. Remember, I can only answer if you ask! Send tech questions by email or Twitter!

Project Shout-outs

Next City "Transit Future Is a Construction Industry Dream, But Should It Be Chicago’s?" - Apr 2014

Vice Creators Project " Explore a Van Gogh-Styled Map " - Aug 2014

Praise from SouthieBikes on a City of Boston project (archived here)

Bask in the glory that is the Boston Bike Network Plan! Best interactive map ever. http://t.co/d5Xstcd36T

— SouthieBikes (@SouthieBikes) October 9, 2013


Shout-out from OpenStreetMap iD maintainer on adding Arabic RTL layout

Excited to merge support for right-to-left display into iD today - thanks @mapmeld for your work on this! 🙇 https://t.co/vpQblB9PwV pic.twitter.com/pC2l8Qorn6

— Bryan Housel (@bhousel) October 8, 2016


Praise from Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on Fortran.IO:

I *must* resist - "Fortran.io finally, a Fortran Web Framework" by @mapmeld https://t.co/tXodGsS0Dx pic.twitter.com/Ft8OwF7eYC

— Werner Vogels (@Werner) December 24, 2016