COSCUP 2014

I gave 3 presentations at COSCUP 2014. It’s my 4th year attending COSCUP in Taipei since 2011. Before the conference, I submitted a proposal at Call For Proposals period. My submitted proposal have been accepted by program committee, which is a 40-minute talk on “Scrapy and Django”.

Open Data should be created and provided by data provider, such as government departmentss and public companies, but unfortunately we are still disappointed to open data at some cities in the world in 2014. Therefore, we can only scrape data from websites in our own to gather useful data.

At the beginning of my presentation, I tells the audiences what is open data, and why should we have it. And then I introduces Scrapy – the open source software I used to scrape the web, and how to integrate it with Django web framework to store the collected data.

My modified slides for latter presentations in Hong Kong after COSCUP is available at my slideshare.

Later on, I agreed to introduce Mozilla Hong Kong community at MozTW Bird of Feather (BoF). I shared about the start of Mozilla community, the Firefox 1.0 Launch Party was the 1st Mozilla community event in Hong Kong, and my contribution starting from Firefox 3 Launch Party.

One day before my departure to Taipei, I decided to present a lightning talk on my open source project – a job board module for Drupal 7. It’s a drupal 7 module providing basic feature of a job advertisement website including multiple categories, RSS feeds for each categories, company information of posters, supporting anonymous posters. Thanks Dick to help to lineup and successfully registering my topic on the poster to  enrolling lightning talks.

I tried to add some gags and fun to raise the audience response, and it is good to have the response which is higher than my expectations, it is still surprising to me.

With Wan-leung’s full support on duty, HKCOTA applied a community booth, and successfully help us to generate more opportunities to communicate with new friends in Taipei.

I enjoys to participate COSCUP, miss Taiwan friends again and see you again next year.