72 Hours at WindEurope: Delivering the service.

It’s Wednesday Afternoon in Copenhagen, and it’s time to deliver both a service and a presentation. This article is for the fifth of our “Six Steps” — you can read the overview here.

This article is aimed at engineers, researchers and execs in the Wind Industry, to help understand the process of digitalisation. If you’re qualified in Systems Architecture or Data/Software Engineering, you’re way ahead of this; just get stuck in already!!

About the ‘Deliver’ Step

‘Delivering’ is all about how easy you make it for the consumers (end users) of the data to get it. Essentially, we’re talking about User Experience.

User Experience (UX) is King. And not just for webapps.

User Experience (UX) is the way that you, and people in your team, will work with your tool. UX isn’t just for webapps — its how anyone interacts with your tool… and your project will live or die on UX. If tools are difficult to use, people avoid them like the plague no matter how smart.

And this right here is why you, a humble engineer somewhere in the vast Wind Industry, are the perfect person for this bit. You know what you need. So don’t be afraid to build something to make your own life easy!

Some things to think about:

• Should there be a Command Line Utility? Check out the Clicks python library for making user friendly CLIs.
• Will you be centralising/storing data somewhere? (See below.)
• Can you wrap complicated stuff in a helper library?
• If so, what language(s) are needed? Try to stick to just one for the first few iterations. Python is pretty popular, or if you know it then Rust is fast and extremely versatile.
• Will you need an API? Cloud Functions are a great way of creating ultra-simple API endpoints.

Where we’re at

We decided that we’d do two things to make it ultra easy to interface with the service. Sure, users can make requests directly to the API but we wanted to make it familiar for basic users of python, and non-technical users.

• Python client (on pypi): https://github.com/octue/windeurope72hours-elevations-client-python
• Map (React/ Javascript using DeckGL): https://je3mob.csb.app/

Try it

pip install windeurope72hours

python

>>> from windeurope72hours import get_coordinate_elevations
    elevations, later, estimated_wait_time = get_coordinate_elevations(
        [[54.53097, 5.96836]],
        resolution=12,
    )
    print(elevations)

>>> {(54.53097, 5.96836): 0.0}

As you pan the map, it automatically fetches elevations near the centre of the view :)

Wrapping up

Now it’s over to YOU! Please use the API or the python client, and let us know how it goes!!