Hack And Tell wrapup 26

gistfile1.txt

# Subject: Round 26, Wait, really?

Tonight was great.  The hacks were awesome.  The crowd was awesome.

But I wanna talk about something serious for a moment.

There has been a surge of interest in Hack And Tell and we're not great about handling it yet.  The reality is that this community has turned into something bigger and better than we expected and we're learning how to organize it as we go.  It was initially a group of 20 of us just hanging out at meetup's offices, where gWoz (Andrew, or GNU Woz which is also Andrew) worked at the time.  I'd present twice, he'd present twice, and maybe a couple other folks would show something.

Andrew and I both grew up in punk rock communities, where people did whatever they wanted and everyone just accepted it.  If you wanted anyone to care about what you were doing, you had to earn their eyes and their ears by doing something cool.  Not too different from how our presenter list is made.  We have ten slots to fill so we just pick the stuff we like best.  If it's neat, we'll probably want to help you figure out more stuff too.  And we know everyone else will too.  That's a big part of why we love Hack And Tell, everyone is helping everyone think in new ways.  But, just like punk rock communities, if you wanna tell us to fuck off, just do it.  We'll say it back.  Or maybe we already said it.  (Andrew probably did).

Punk shows were easy to organize.  You just find a space, a PA system, and the bands bring their gear.  You can see our punk roots in Hack And Tell's structure.  We have 10 hackers instead of 4 bands.  We have clean office space instead of dingy basements.  I've still got my Dillinger hoodie on and Andrew's still got his Bane shirt on, but we're hacking.  

When bands somehow got a following they'd go on tour.  Hack And Tell kinda did that too.  It's in lots of places now.  Seattle, SF, Boulder, Madison, Kansas City, DC, Berlin, Singapore, Melbourne.  I was at the DC one on Monday and did two presentations, just like the early days in NYC.

We had more people on the waiting list than at the show tonight.  200+ people wanted to come tonight.  It's hard to find spaces big enough to hold even half that.  Needing spaces that big is a also recent thing for us.  We used to be able to find spots no problem, but it's not so easy once you get above 75 people.  We only started insisting on 100 person lists at the beginning of the summer and it looks like we need to go even higher aready.

I'll just be straight forward about it, we haven't really been trying.  This seems ridiculous in retrospect so we're gonna change that.  This email is going out early.  We're gonna host the meetup more regularly.  We're gonna solve it.

OK.  Enough seriousness.


# Presenters

## Gabe Ghearing
Cheap portable photo booth, using mobile cameras with OpenGL shaders and thermal receipt printers.
* [code](https://github.com/gabebear/receiptbooth/)

## Octavian Costache
GreatMonkey script that manipulates gmail to scrape info about any email address from Rapportive.  Octavian didn't want to share a URL for this project as it can be so easily abused.  (fine)

## Jesse Davis
Jesse found a subtle bug in Python's threading system and worked with the Python team to get it fixed.
* [Night Of The Living Thread!](http://emptysqua.re/blog/night-of-the-living-thread/)
* [bug tracker](http://bugs.python.org/issue18418)

## Skye Shaw
GUI for Apple's ITMSTransporter command line tool. ITMSTransporter is a tool for submitting media, like apps, music, video, etc, to the iTunes store.
* [code](https://github.com/sshaw/itunes_store_transporter_web/)

## Max Krohn 
Triplesec, Triply paranoid encryption for the browser
* [page](https://keybase.io/triplesec/)
* [code](https://github.com/keybase/triplesec)

## Andrew Kelley
Music player server with a web-based user interface, inspired by Amarok 1.4. This project also includes a new generic music player backend, written in C, called "libgroove" (that: 
* [groove basin code](https://github.com/superjoe30/groovebasin)
* [libgroove code](https://github.com/superjoe30/libgroove)

## Allison Kaptur
Allison gave us a tour of Python's bytecode and Python's bytecode interpreter written in C, and then contrasted that interpreter with one written in Python.
* [code](https://github.com/akaptur/byterun)
* [fun with dis](http://akaptur.github.io/blog/2013/08/14/python-bytecode-fun-with-dis/)
* [bytecode is made of bytes](http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/10/14/day-9-bytecode-is-made-of-bytes/)

## Alex Golec
Computational toymaking: create algorithmically generated, unique three dimensional puzzles.  No URL offered because he spoke to an IP lawyer that convinced him to keep it to himself. (booooo)

## Sidney San Martín
Team is an event loop (libuv)-driven coroutines library for C++ that focses on ease of use and minimal, clean syntax.
* [github](https://github.com/Sidnicious/team)

## Kelsey Jordahl
GeoPandas is a project to add support for geographic data to the pandas data hacking library while providing compatibility with the shapely geometry library.
* [github](https://github.com/kjordahl/geopandas)

## Bill Abresch
A single-page web application for visualizing political and conflict event data.  A map of projections are generated d3, but of the display changes are made through direct DOM-manipulation.  The project also birthed a very cool json database for client side javascript to manage huge lists efficiently.
* [running app](http://wija.github.io/follow/)
* [follow code](https://github.com/wija/follow)
* [json-data code](https://github.com/wija/json-database.js)


# Fin

Happy hacking,
James and Andrew