Tokyo Built a Stupidly Good Coronavirus Website, and It's Open Source

A few days ago I went through a familiar cycle of “damn, I wish I could do something useful”, to “oh hey, I’m a programmer, maybe that’s useful”, and finally “well all my ideas have already been built by people smarter than me, I’ll go back to watching Bob’s Burgers.”

At the same time, I found the source code for the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Covid-19 Task Force website. And as it happens, coders working for the city bureaucrats went out of their way to open-source their work! It’s available under the well known MIT Licence, which effectively means you can do anything you want with their code. Due to that, the site has been forked (copied), to run the corona virus info websites for at least 15 other major Japanese cities. Each city’s fork is connected to their local coronavirus statistics and announcement pages to give relevant information. including Osaka, Nara, Hokkaido, Hiroshima, and Kyoto.