Bruce Elgort

Use What You Have

Have you ever noticed when someone shares something amazing, people always want to know what they used to create it? Photographers get asked what lens they used, illustrators get asked about brushes, painters get asked about brands of paint. In this week’s episode of Getting Work To Work, Chris Martin talks about the value of using what you have today to create your work. Not what you wish you had or what you might have in the future, what you have today.

Listen Now >

Road Runner Rules: More what you’d call Guidelines for Design Systems

Wouldn’t it be great if we could spend less time trying to style the markup we’ve been handed, and more time creating a system of smart, reusable design components?

Well, we’re in luck. With the increased popularity of pattern libraries and the Twig powered flexibility we’ll be seeing in Drupal 8, we finally have the tools to create and deploy our own design systems.

But what is a design system, and how do we create them? What rules should it follow? How do I get my team on board?

You Want Me To Fail?

In this week’s episode of Getting Work To Work, Chris Martin talk about failure and share five ways to change the way you think about failure. Every week it seems there is a new blog post for creative professionals espousing the value of failing, but to a lot of people, failure is a negative experience and something to avoid at all cost. Is there a better way to think about failure?

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# Using the IBM Bluemix Weather Company API
# Bruce Elgort
# July 9, 2016
# Version 1.0
# IBM Weather Company Docs: https://console.ng.bluemix.net/docs/services/Weather/weather_rest_apis.html#rest_apis

import requests
import json

def get_weather(zip):
    username = 'your username'
    password = 'your password'

    watsonUrl = 'https://twcservice.mybluemix.net/api/weather/v1/location/' + zip + ':4:US' + '/observations.json?language=en-US'

    try:
        r = requests.get(watsonUrl,auth=(username,password))
        return r.text
    except:
        return False

def display_weather(results):
    print()
    print('Here is the weather for {0}'.format(results['observation']['obs_name']))
    print('{0:20} {1:&lt;10}'.format('Current Temperature:',str(results['observation']['temp']) + '° and ' + results['observation']['wx_phrase']))
    print('{0:20} {1:&lt;10}'.format('Feels Like: ',str(results['observation']['feels_like']) + '°'))
    print('{0:20} {1:&lt;10}'.format('Low Temp: ',str(results['observation']['min_temp']) + '°'))
    print('{0:20} {1:&lt;10}'.format('High Temp: ',str(results['observation']['max_temp']) + '°'))
    print('{0:20} {1:&lt;10}'.format('Winds:',str(results['observation']['wspd']) + ' mph coming from the ' + results['observation']['wdir_cardinal']))

def get_weather():
    zip = input('Enter US ZIP code to get weather for:\n')
    results = get_weather(zip)
    if results != False:
        results = json.loads(str(results))
        display_weather(results)
    else:
        print('Something went wrong :-(')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    get_weather()

Bruce Elgort

Use What You Have

Road Runner Rules: More what you’d call Guidelines for Design Systems

You Want Me To Fail?

What To Do After Graduation‬

Meagan Fisher, “Users Are People Too”

Boon Sheridan, “Rules, Hunches, and Coin Flips”

The Business of Beacons

Mike Monteiro: Let Us Now Praise Ordinary People

IBM Bluemix Weather Company API with Python