Ronaldo’s CfA Summer

As one of the first interns at CfA, I am pleased with my experience with both CFA and Google Summer of Code. This summer I was assigned to develop PHP libraries on existing government related projects.

Much of my work has focused on v2 of the Open311 API spec, National Health Library API’s, creating a API base class, and implementing continuous integration strategies using SimpleTest and Jenkins. With the new base class, I was quickly able to create the following libraries :

• product_recall_php – Search known Federal Product Recall data.
• usa_spending_php – Search databases that track USA spending.
• faa_php – Query FAA for Airport delays/updates.
• chronicling-america-php – Search American periodicals.
• world_bank_php – Search database with World Bank statistics.
• open311_php – For interacting with municipal based help-ticket system; updated for v2.
• National Health Library API’s
• RxNorm – Semantic Medications Tool.
• NDF-rt – Searches drug interactions.
• Toxnet – Searches known toxin databases.
• Pillbox – Search drugs based on physical pill descriptions.

Of these API’s I was able to quickly put together a small web App RXNix for the RxNorm API which was recently created this summer. This App interfaces with a database created by the National Library of Health to give healthcare professionals a single location to convert a variety of existing medical codes (for concepts, drugs, ingredients and related) to the new Unified Medical Language System.

(Editor’s Note: Over the summer of 2011, over a dozen students interned with Code for America. They brought great energy, passion, and skills to bear on our projects and our mission to make government more open and efficient. Over the next week, we’ll be posting their summaries of their work and learnings, in addition to an overview of the summer.)

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