At the end of each semester at The Iron Yard, our students present their final projects to the local development community and potential employers at our Demo Day. We had our most recent one this Friday, and it was fantastic. It was particularly special to me, as I’ve been out with the King Under the Mountain and so haven’t been as involved in my students’ final projects as last time. My colleagues Jessica, Mason, and Chris stepped up to help them across the finish line.

I was blown away. It made sense that I was blown away last semester, not having a frame of reference for what a group of motivated students could pull off in 3 weeks after 9 weeks of class, but I thought I knew this time. I was wrong: what these people pulled off was nothing short of staggering.

Not all of them are online, but two are:

• Civic Compass will look up your legislators and show you detailed information about your Congresspeople’s funders. It goes even further, though: it looks at their voting record and gives you an influence score to show how aligned the legislator is with their funders’ voting interests. On top of all that, it has a public API so you can remix the information.

• Ramblethru helps you plan your next trip without the hassle of going to half-a-dozen sites and then hand-copying notes into yet another place. It brings in results from Foursquare, Yelp, Instagram, and other places, and lets you save them and make your own notes.

The News & Observer, our local paper, did a nice writeup on the school and Demo Day, even if they did have the same problem as everyone else: is it called The Iron Yard or Smashing Boxes?

The next Demo Day promises to be even bigger and better. We’ll have around 45 students, and will have the event at Motorco. If I know how to use a calendar, it’ll be on April 3, 2015. You should come out if you can!