In the second year of the Lede Program, I learned a lot about programming in non-English environments. I learned the German keyboard puts the Y in a different place, that I’d always need to hit the “stop trying to type hanzi” button when working on a Chinese computer, and most of all Python is absolute garbage when working with anything other than the 100% standard American alphabet.
So here we are: this is a guide to help international data journalists (and other coders) read between the lines of their error messages and understand tutorials with code that doesn’t quite work worldwide.
When you step out of the USA, dealing with text gets a lot more complicated.
It isn’t all just latitude and longitude. Coming eventually!
“But we don’t have FOIA!” is the rallying cry of much of the world. Also coming soon!