Recent content in Home on Marcus Dillavou
Camp Counselor Web is a port of the desktop Camp Counselor App to the web. Camp Counselor is a web application for managing your bandcamp.com wishlist. Camp Counselor automatically fetches your wish list (and purchases), and lets you comment, rate, listen to, and organize to help you keep track of your favorite artists and albums. Install Camp Counselor Web is meant to be self-hosted. Please see…
Camp Counselor is a GNOME application for managing your bandcamp.com wishlist. Camp Counselor automatically fetches your wish list (and purchases), and lets you comment, rate, listen to, and organize to help you keep track of your favorite artists and albums. Camp Counselor is mobile friendly and also works on a Pinephone! Install The easiest way to install Camp Counselor is through Flathub.…
Go Transit App is a series of transit apps for various cities. It is based on the Montclair project. A custom transmogrifier takes a configuration and generates a “white-labeled” version of the website, Android App, and iOS App for a specific city. Example Configuration You can see an example configuration for Indianapolis, Indiana here. More Information For more information, please…
Hello and Welcome! My name is Marcus Dillavou. By day I am the co-founder and lead engineer/architect for Help Lightning where I develop our backend in Elixir. Nights and weekends I am a civic hacktivist, trying to make my home of Birmingham, AL a better place to live. This site is focused mostly on my civic hacking projects, which revolve around improving public transportation.
Montclair, is a simple, pure javascript App built with React, for tracking city buses in realtime. It supports any transit agency that is powered by Availtec or TransLoc APIs. What’s with name? The #44 - Montclair is the route I take everyday to work. Background Birmingham, Alabama’s transit agency, the BJCTA (Birmingham-Jefferson County Transit Authority) has a website for tracking the…
Sardines is a simple web app that I wrote to compare the density of Birmingham, Alabama to other cities in the world. This app shows you where the citizens must reside if our density was similar to another city. For example, if Birmingham, which has a low density, had the same high density as Paris, then the entire population would have to squeeze into just a small part of downtown.
Subte is no longer actively maintained. Introduction Subte is software for generating GTFS transit data. This data can then be used with trip planners like Google Transit or Open Trip Planner. Subte, named after the underground metro in Buenos Aires, was created to aid in creating GTFS for the BJCTA Max Bus system in Birmingham, AL, and was designed around the online stop cataloger I developed.
This App is no longer active. Please use the official My Mobile App or my Montclair App This is an Android App for planning trips on the BJCTA Bus System in Birmingham, AL. This utilizes all my backend work I have done on collecting stops and generating trips. This App is based on an existing open source Open Trip Planner app, and was customized by me and tailored to work with my data and my…
The Innovation Depot Bike Share is no longer active as the city of Birmingham has rolled out a city wide bike share system, called Zyp. My company at the time, VIPAAR, was located at the Innovation Depot which is a incubator for start up technology companies in Birmingham, AL. The Innovation Depot is located on the west side of downtown, which is just slightly outside of walking distance of most…
Click that ‘hood, is an additive little game developed by Code for America where you test your knowledge of the neighborhoods. Being an activist for Birmingham, along with my fondness of maps, I decided I would get Birmingham up on their site. After all, they just need some GIS data formatted correctly. No problem, I’ve worked with GIS data plenty of times before! Unfortunately when it comes…
This article is very dated. It was written in 2013 when I started work on improving the accessibility of Birmingham’s bus system Background This documents my journey to build a trip planner for Birmingham’s Bus System. The BJCTA is the organization behind Birmingham’s transit system, currently consisting only of buses. The BJCTA has been very slow adopt new technology for…
The Magic City Connector is a proposal to build a gondola (Ski resort kind, not Venice kind), over Red Mountain on the south side of downtown Birmingham. The goal for phase one is to connect the neighborhoods of Five Points South and downtown Homewood. Later phases could extend the gondola all the way down 20th St to the BJCC (Convention Center) and entertainment district. You can find more…