Leveraging Drupal for Self-Tracking and Quantified Self Projects

markwk's picture
Technical Project Manager and Developer, Int3c
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Can self-tracking and personal data help us become more productive, healthier, and happier? 

While most of the recent news about personal data is on privacy, data leaks and survelliance, personal data and self-tracking also holds an incredible amount of potential. Our personal data can help us understand, improve and augment our lives. 

In this talk, we will be exploring self-tracking and quantified self and how to use Drupal for an array of personal self-tracking and quantified self projects. For example, we can use Drupal to build a simple web scrapper to collect weather and air quality or leverage Drupal to create a tool to sync data from RSS feeds to build a web reader or even a podcast tracker. We can even use Drupal to store our aggregate self-tracking data and even build a simple personal data dashboard. 

Terms like "Quantified Self" and "Self-Tracking" stand for the "activity of measuring or documenting something about your self, " and, with thousands of apps and dozens of wearables, it’s easier than ever to track our lives, work and bodies with a smartphone, wearable, home sensor or computer.

The first part of this talk will provide an introduction to QS and self-tracking and some of the usages for becoming a data-driven. In the second part, we will explore a few practical applications built using Drupal, Feeds and other standard Drupal modules, like environmental trackers, media trackers, and even a simple personal data dashboard. Finally, in the third part, we will look at few ways you track your life and become data-driven. 

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Mark Koester is a self-tracker, writer, and web and mobile app developer. Creator: PhotoStatsApp, a photo tracking app without the cloud, PodcastTracker, a web app to log your podcast listening, Biomarker Tracker, a health analytics service to better understand your blood test results, and QS Ledger, an aggregator of data from tracking services and personal data dashboard . He currently runs a boutique dev shop (Int3c.com) and is an active open source contributor, including multiple Drupal modules. Former Regional Lead in Greater China at Techstars Accelerator. He regularly writes about self-tracking, quantified self and data-driven life at www.markwk.com.