Jonathan – True Wind Technology

Vaccine Appointment Searching with Puppeteer and Twilio

Jonathan — Wed, 12 May 2021 14:01:56 +0000

Earlier this Spring (2021), a friend of mine involved in K-12 education wanted to get his first vaccination appointment, and found himself repeatedly checking the UNC health care system's page to see a notice that said that no appointments were available yet. He was in the middle of teaching himself Python, so he wrote a simple scraper that checked that page every 5 minutes and - when the notice was no longer there - blasted Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" through his house to let him know to run up and snag an appointment.

Not to be outdone, I decided to write something similar using Node.js: Using Puppeteer to scrape the site, I checked this page regularly, and if vaccination appointments were available, it would dig deeper, looking at available appointment sites and comparing their addresses to my location to see what the Google API said the driving distance was. If it was within a certain threshold (for example 1 hour), it would use the Twilio API to send me a text message with a direct link to the registration page. Below is the repository containing the code. Fortunately this is no longer necessary in North Carolina: anyone can get vaccinated at this point, and the tool is no longer useful.

https://github.com/jetweedy/vaxapp

How to Get Vaccinated in NC

Jonathan — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 14:10:02 +0000

Figure out which Group you're in:

https://findmygroup.nc.gov/

Sign up for the Duke waiting list:

https://www.dukehealth.org/covid-19-update/join-waiting-list

They will contact you with openings. This is how I got a Jannsen (Johnson and Johnson) vaccine.

Check the UNC Appointments Regularly:

https://www.unchealthcare.org/coronavirus/vaccines/phase-1b-covid-19-vaccine/

There will often be a message on there staying "We’re very sorry, but all vaccine appointments have been scheduled", but when there's not, you answer a brief questionnaire and then see which vaccines are available and where. The slots get snatched up quickly, and sometimes they're hours away.

Check Walgreens Regularly:

https://www.walgreens.com/findcare/vaccination/covid-19/location-screening

They do it by zip code, so you might have to enter a number of zip codes before you find something near you. If you're willing to drive a ways, try a variety of nearby codes.

A Note on the Experience

Other people’s experiences may differ, but I was not grilled on my “eligibility” for Phase 3b. I just filled out the answers to the survey when trying to find an appointment online, and then when I got to the appointment, all they did was confirm my identity (photo ID, name, birthday, allergies) and give me some general info on the vaccine before they jabbed me. In general, don’t feel “afraid” to make an appointment. If you answer the questions reasonably, step through and get your appointment, you’re not going to get in “trouble” for signing up in the wrong phase. It’s just a way of helping people line up in an orderly fashion, not a punitive system that will be audited and scrutinized. Read the questions, try to be honest about your situation, and get it as soon as you can!

Local Development with Vagrant

Jonathan — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 21:18:24 +0000

If you're getting into development, and are looking for a convenient way to set up a development environment on your machine without creating a lot of clutter that you can't easily uninstall later, one great solution is Vagrant, which allows users to script out the creation of virtual environments in programs like VirtualBox. Both are free software, and although there is somewhat of a learning curve to set it up yourself, if you'd like to just have a quick and easy setup, I've developed a set of setup scripts that will allow you quickly run a virtual machine setup, enter the virual machine's command line, and install things like MySQL (MariaDB), PHP, Python and Node.js so that you can develop using any or all of those languages.

Downloads and Instructions can be found here.

Custom Field Templating

Jonathan — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 21:10:23 +0000

There are two very useful plugins for WordPress that enable the development of custom post types with specialized fields. Custom Post Type UI (CPT UI) allows users to create custom post types like "Person" or "Article", and Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) allows users to include additional fields beyond just title and content: for example, first and last name, phone number, job titles, etc.

Unfortunately, the final part of what would otherwise be a beautiful trifecta is sorely lacking. Developers who don't want to have to dig into the wp-content/plugins directory to create new content types are left without good options to systematically display these post types in various areas of the site like staff listings or bibliographies. In response to this gap, I developed a (still kind of clunky) plugin that allows authors to include shortcode markup directly in the page editor to specify repetitive content layouts without having to code a special shortcode and include it as an additional plugin.

How to use it:

Download the zip file here.
Upload the Zip file in your Plugins manager on WordPress.
Activate the Plugin.
Create relevant Post Types and Custom Fields.
Edit your posts using the provided markup conventions (see sample when downloading).

Easily Rename your Posts Page

Jonathan — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 20:56:00 +0000

An incredibly frustrating issue with the WordPress platform is that it's difficult to rename your Blog page without digging around in the theme files. While other page titles can be modified using various hooks, I have yet to find an easy way to override the forced title "Blog" at the top of the posts page selected under the Appearance > Customize > Homepage without some JavaScript-y magic, so I've created this quick plugin that will - when activated - simply use the actual title of the page that you specify. Why this isn't always the default action is beyond me, but with this plugin, it can be.

Instructions:

Download the plugin here.
Upload the Zip file to your Plugins section in WordPress.
Activate the plugin.

What is True Wind?

Jonathan — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 20:43:02 +0000

Begun in early 2017, True Wind Technology is a web development agency based out of Carrboro, North Carolina that offers reasonably-priced, customized solutions to individuals, artists, small businesses and academic organizations in the areas of web design and development and data management and analysis. The group was initially formed in response to the sense that lower-budget projects are often ignored by competent firms in favor of bigger-budget items, and then find themselves at the mercy of less-qualified professionals who take longer to develop solutions that are often of lower quality, thereby in fact increasing the cost over time. We hope to address this gap in service by specifically targeting smaller-budget problems and/or academic research projects that are at risk of being taken advantage of by price-gouging. We offer fair rates for competent and experienced work, and we are just as happy to offer these services to four-figure projects as we are to the six-figure ones.