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Hello Hackers-
Thanks to Meetup for hosting us! They've supported us since the very beginning, and of course are amazing hosts!
We should really bring these back. They're lots of fun. Have a puzzle that you'd like to challenge us with? Email us, and maybe we'll include it in the next wrap up, or as an RSVP challenge[0].
Andrew showed us chem, an HTML5 game engine/toolkit which makes building HTML5 games fast. This guy is completely legit. I know this because IcedCoffeeScript is one of the supported languages.
Though he failed to live-code a demo (and who wouldn't?), he did woo us with his port of Dr Chemical's Lab.
Max showed us One Shall Pass, a pure client side Javascript, and cryptographically strong solution to the password problem. You memorize one moderately long pass phrase, and let One Shall Pass compute a password for you.
Of course, it can't always be that simple, so One Shall Pass supports different security settings, an option for adding symbols, and a generation parameter which allows you to always use the same base password, but change the computed password, for when LinkedIn's db gets broken into again.
Andrew spent five minutes feverishly attempting to explain the One Pass Real-Time Generational Mark Sweep Garbage Collection algorithm that Erlang used in the mid-90s.
- slides
- actual implementation (most likely broken)
We saw a quick and dirty Arduino hack from Nicolus, who is using his $97 in parts to light up some LEDs when some websites are down. Of course, the learning experience (he's a first time hardware hacker) is well worth the $97, and it is a cool idea.
Nathan showed us herald, a simple way to publish release notes for a project to a central place (supports Tumblr only right now). While it's written in Scala and used by the Scala community now, it's built in such a way that other communities could easily adopt it as well.
Bitcoin seems to be all the rage these days, and Andrey presented a Bitcoin wallet that you can use within Chrome. It seems to use Twitter's Bootstrap heavily (sigh), but I can honestly say, Bootstrap and Chrome extensions go well together.
Jordan's favorite pastimes are (in no particular order), building things to make sound, and telling everyone how much he loves the Go programming language. While I could do without the latter, I love seeing what he comes up in regards to the former.[1] This time was no exception, but come on man, we need more than one color! (Note: This hack wasn't done in Go (surprise!), it actually used some C++)
When new HTML5 features like WebRTC are combined with OpenCV, funny images from the Internet, and a little bit of caffeine, you get You Laugh, You Lose, a silly game in which you attempt to not laugh before your opponents.
(I don't see the source, so I've linked to his GitHub profile in hopes that it'll appear)
Ken quit his cushy job to follow his passion of making video games. The twist? He doesn't just draw graphics, he uses the delicate fine art of needle felting, and the tedious process of stop motion animation. Voyager is his first game, due out soon on iOS.
We'll need a place to meetup, a pizza sponsor and lots more great hacks. If you can help with any of that, let us know!
Meetup is holding a series of Hackathons--there's still time to get in on the fun Battle of the Braces.
Don't know what Maker Faire is? Well, you'd better check it out! Maker Faire
I don't get much time to read the web these days, so I've been relying more and more on a weekly mailing list called Coder Weekly. It gets sent every weekend and has a good mix of interesting articles.
Until next time!
Happy Hacking,
Andrew
[0]: "Oh man, those first four hundred bites of dirt were not so good. Maybe the next one will be better. WHAAAT is this? Some sort of a challenge buried in the GROUUUND? Lookie hear! A power crunch! Tastes like a #1 jam!" -- Strong Bad Email #115
[1]: While I do write Go professionally, I'm not as fond of it as Jordan by any stretch of the imagination. If you're looking to avoid C/C++ or want to stop worrying about jars, but still get the benefits of garbage collection (albeit a horrible one), you should check out Go. However, you'd probably be much better off learning to write really clean, idiomatic Haskell, as the people behind it are some of the smartest programming language people that have walked the Earth. Though, personally, I much prefer a dynamically typed Lisp-1 such as Scheme.
Awesome. You what it could be even more awesome? To publish mail/twitter of the hackers, to stal...ehm follow them and ask about the hack directly to them.