In late October, the WSJ published Waste Lands, an interactive database I helped build and report. Waste Lands draws upon thousands of public records and other sources to trace the history of hundreds of factories and laboratories the government recruited to help develop nuclear weapons during the build-up to the Cold War.
Building the database took considerable time and effort. But it would have been immeasurably more difficult and time-consuming — if not nearly impossible — without the fistfuls of open-source code we were able to rely upon:
- Flask
- Frozen Flask
- Django
- Django Grappelli
- South for Django
- Django Localflavor
- Python U.S.
- jQuery
- Underscore
- MultiMarker
- FlexSlider
- jQuery hashchange
As a gesture of thanks, I've extracted two small, reusable bits of the project and released them as open-source code on GitHub:
- GMap Button is a JavaScript library for adding buttons to embedded Google Maps.
- minicard is a bare-bones CSS stylesheet for creating "card"-style elements.
Neither are particularly groundbreaking. But the next time someone builds a project like this (or something altogether different), perhaps it'll save them a little time and let them focus on the meatier parts.
— Jeremy Singer-Vine, Nov. 2013