Good docs help people use your work, but they have other benefits too. They encourage community contributions. They save you from your past self when you’re revisiting your own code six months from now. And they help you think: much like talking to a rubber duck helps you find bugs, carefully documenting your work for users helps you see it from a different perspective and design better code.

Last week, as part of the OpenNews post-election Code Convening, Jenny Ye and Noah Veltman put the finishing touches on Wherewolf, a JavaScript library that lets you run a boundary service in a browser.

At the 2014 OpenNews code convening, we took on the task of making a reusable system that could allow other organizations to produce something sentiment grids with a bare minimum of technical know-how. The result was FourScore, a library that allows you to set a few configuration options to produce your very own interactive sentiment grid. It even works in IE8, and maybe doesn’t totally not work in IE7.

The first full round of March Madness is Christmas morning for college basketball fans: 2 days, 32 games, lots of upsets and late-game drama. Last week, on the first full day of the tournament, WNYC transportation reporter Jim O’Grady casually mentioned that he couldn’t keep tabs on all the action during the day. He wished he could get a text message whenever a game was coming down to the wire so he would know when to neglect his professional responsibilities and tune in for the end. I started kicking around the idea in my head a little, and after work my colleague Jenny Ye and I decided to take a break from writing weird JavaScript to write some more weird JavaScript. The result was @NailbiterBot, a humble Twitter bot that posts a tweet whenever an NCAA tournament game is close late in the second half.

OpenNews Fellow Noah Veltman breaks down the design and code decisions behind his History of SF Place Names map.