24 Pull Requests

This week was round two for GCM at Huge Inc., the incredibly communally active web design firm in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

This event, named 24 Pull Requests, was a part of a larger event taking place (I think) the world over. The purpose of the 24PR is to promote giving back to the open source community by submitting a pull request as a gift during December every day leading up to Christmas.

As always, Huge came through tremendously in the food department. There was a little bit of stir when the floor above us started leaking water everywhere (The third floor has been under construction since before the last time GCM visited.), but it was quickly taken care of.

There were perhaps 15 developers there to work, about 5 of whom were actually bringing their project in hopes of finding some new people to help build their open source education platform. (Unfortunately I wasn't able to get a name). People worked from about 6pm - 10pm with tacos and beer. All in all, a good night of hacking.

This event has inspired me to make an effort to focus a bit more on the open source community for this blog, so expect to see another group of meetups added to the "Regulars" page above sometime soon.

EDIT - We were able to work for a while with a really cool guy named Michael Kolodny who is working on building a website to help ease the apartment hunting process. I think it has some potential to be a really great service. If you know someone who's going to be moving soon, let them know about Janther. 

Intel's Internet of Things Hackathon

My reaction to some blinking lights.

This weekend Intel hosted a hackathon at Huge to promote the Galileo and the Edison, their line of maker-oriented modular computers. The first 100 pre-registered attendees was given an incredibly generous bag of hardware:

• 1 Intel Edison
• 1 Intel Galileo
• 1 Grove Starter Kit
• Bag of useful cables
• 8gb USB with a bunch of tutorials, documentation, and getting started guides.

In total, without any winnings or additional prizes (they were pretty liberal with the prize giving, but we didn't get lucky), we ended up walking out with around $600 worth of hardware at the end of the first day.

The people who presented to the 200ish individuals in attendance stayed throughout the hackathon working on their own projects and helping the other groups when they needed it. We got to hear from the Octoblu team about a project to consolidate APIs into one visual interface that allows users to forgo any kind of intense documentation study. I know a few teams made use of their (currently free) service in their projects. One of the more interesting ones they told us about was using their system to operate some limited capabilities on a car that Intel gave them to hack on.

I was mostly focused on getting familiar with the hardware. The documentation was unfortunately sparse on most of the components, especially for the newly added JavaScript compatibility (made possible with node.js). If you knew C or C++ you were in a better place, but for web guys like me, it was rough trying to figure out how things worked.

Intel made this weekend pretty great for everyone. Free computers. Free learning. Free food. I'm looking forward to the next large scale hackathon that comes to town. If it's anything like this one was, it'll be a great time.