Round 14 brought DC Hack and Tell to whole new levels of awesomeness. We saw, heard, and partied in celebration of the inimitable Shannon joining DC H&T as an official organizer. We welcomed a code of conduct of superb pedigree (may we always be excellent to one another). And there were super cool projects!
Speaker 0 - Aaron
Aaron built a static blog pulling in previous blog XML data and allowing for parallel big slides with some konami code magic.
Speaker 1 - Joe
Joe built a way for a remote staff member to turn lights on / off in HQ to get attention of staff. And there are slides! And a repo!
Speaker 2 - Leah B.
Leah built a tool to help provide transparency in government services, akin to gov.uk/transformation. (Apparently they are awesome & we should all be like these individuals). The equivalent FOR THE UNITED STATES is online and open source. Go 18F!
Speaker 3 - Shannon
Shannon made a site to showcase universities that are hiding the degree of sexual assault that is occurring on their campuses. Given the likelihood of sexual cases actually being 0 is remote, they are more than likely simply not reporting actual numbers. Data is from the Washington Post; over 500 schools reported 0 occurrences over a three year period. And now you can see it on a map, and also see the source.
Speaker 4 - Morgana
Morgana built an app to solve: “If there is a Nats game, how soon do I have to leave my house? And if there is not a Nats game, what are my alternatives?” (In IPython Notebook.) Python source on github. More APIs than you can shake a bat at.
Speaker 5 - Mot
(Thanks RebelMail for bringing Mot to our coast!) Mot made a JavaScript library called historysniff to deduce a visitors’ browser history from a manifest file of websites. Uses a hacky approach based on asset load time (cached vs uncached). Looks for specific assets in cache to see if they were at a site recently.
Speaker 6 - Brian
UFOs: Implausible Deniability? Brian used BeautifulSoup for scraping UFO data, and applied a slew of visualizations and algorithms to it. For the hilarious results… you really had to be there.
Speaker 7 - Leah L.
Leah built Arduino-controlled light gauntlets for Halloween to be Alina Starkov. And you can build your own, thanks to her instructables write-up, Accelerometer Controlled Light Gauntlets! (If you only have six seconds, you can check it out on vine.)
Speaker 8 - Chris
Chris made an open source election results map for the DC mayoral and marijuana legalization votes. It uses Leaflet for mapping. The election waited for no one! The live site ran at electionmap.wamu.org (github.io link) Starting to think Chris can’t stop making cool web maps all the time…
That was Round 14! Thanks to everyone who presented, everyone who attended, and our favorite WeWork in the whole world!
Round 15 is already scheduled for Monday December 8, so go sign up - and get your hacks ready for telling! (Still really looking for somebody to present on hoverboards… Come on, everybody!)