DC Hack and Tell

Round 10: Bidouille in English

The awesomeness that descended on WeWork Chinatown for the last DC Hack and Tell was truly astonishing. Let the record show! To the extent that words can capture so much awesomeness:

• Aaron got the crowd warmed up with a brain dump about asking question on ye olde webber-net.

• Nick will show you where all the drone strikes have been in Pakistan and Yemen. He’s done a LOT of cool web visualizations for this data. And here’s another thing visualizing a bunch of drone stuff. (Ugh drone strikes.)

• Chris took us back to the future with AppleScript, which is alive and kicking. Merge PowerPoint files! Compensate for weird Apple bugs! Now AppleScripting with Ruby and even JavaScript!

• Reed put a programming language in your URLs. And there’s a whole document about it! So cool! (And did you know about giphy and it’s API?)

• Dave and Eric tag-teamed to bring us the latest on Supreme Court and FISA court scraping/publishing. The only constant is change - even for published court documents! And now there’s servo (github/npm) for this kind of monitoring - so good! [As seen on Gigaom]

• Josh followed on with the connected work he did building (and re-building) tooling for (visual) diffs of text in PDF documents. Building new eyes for looking at the world, and putting them on github, so that now you can see things such as this!

• Nathan told us about Not In My Country, a project fighting corruption (currently in universities of Uganda and Kenya). They’ve got a campaign on GlobalGiving - you’ve got five days to help support whistle-blowers in Kenya! And then there was also the whole pirate mesh radio network thing… wild!

• Puneet (of Creative Commons Science!) was in town and shared an idea for the future of Terms of Service. (Hint: It’s better than any Terms of Service you’re seeing out there right now.)

A huge thanks to all the presenters and everyone who came out - great presenters, great audience!

The next Hack and Tell is already scheduled! It’s going to be on Monday, July 21, at 7, at WeWork Chinatown. It’s Round 11: Never odd or eveN!

• RSVP on Meetup!
• Sign up to present!

It’s shaping up to be the best Hack and Tell yet! Can’t wait. Happy hacking!

[H&T wrap-ups on github] [H&T central] [the timer]

(Looking for some sort of web thing to hack on? How about making the timer work better on iOS/Android? Is there some way to keep the screen on, like video playback does? Make audio more audible? Add some other features maybe? This is your chance to contribute to the most prestigious Hack and Tell timer web application in the world!)