I really dig being involved in projects that can help people, and truly appreciated working with Oregon Public Broadcasting and Hack Oregon to create Aftershock… but it always kind of bugged me that I never had a chance to circle back around to it and make it into the open source project I always felt it should be.

Enter: Carson MacPherson-krutsky, her advisor at the University of Montana, and a small development team. Over the span of only a few months they were able to figure out and refine a codebase filled with shortcuts and hardcoding to meet the challenges of a 3 day hackathon with almost no guidance from the original dev team (aka: me and Brandon Stump). Really impressive!

Check out Missoula Ready and see what they’ve been up to! There’s still a lot of Aftershock DNA under the hood; the core content is still the Story Nugget, also called a “Snugget,” and the look and feel still has a bit of the original flavor there. However, the new generalized codebase can handle a lot more data, more “story nuggets,” and a few new tricks. Maybe it’s only the first of many spin-offs? I can only hope so… more hazard information like this means more saved lives.