Hacker-Mapper

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This was my entry for the HackNY 2010 hackathon, which was meant to take 2 hours and be a useful bit of infrastructure that everyone would immediately love and use. Of course, real life is not so kind, and it took me almost the entire hackathon to get it working, at which point it was useless.

So what’s it do? It’s supposed to ameliorate a problem with large hackathons, where there are hackers that need projects and projects that need hackers, and once a hacker finds a project through IRC, they want to have some wideband back-and-forth with the rest of the guys on the project, so he needs to find them in physical space. The project marks themselves on a map, which can be whipped up for each hackathon in a couple of minutes, so the hacker can find them. It uses lots of pretty AJAX and runs with a rails backend; at the time, Stablehost’s (my current web host) rails support was lacking, so I had to spin up a rackspace instance, which really turned me onto the utility of Rackspace. Cool.

In hindsight, it seems like an over-engineered solution to a small problem. Ah well.

Blog

Here's me blogging about hackny in general; I was kind of tired, so there's essentially nothing of note in that particular blog post.

Code

The code is over at my github: it'll take another couple of iterations to get it to a really useful state, but don't hold your breath for it to get done. Heck, I wouldn't even hold my breath for me to slap an MIT license on it, but that's what I'd slap on it if I slapped anything on it.