Coding In Paradise

Man, what an amazing event! We had a post-Mash Pit dinner and party at Lonely Palm.

Here's some more info about the three projects that were produced at the end of the day.

The first one was called Whuffie Tracker; the idea there was to produce a single site that could take your list of blogs and online sites, query other remote sites like Technorati and Flickr, and tell you who is talking about you.

The second project was a unique blend of a Wiki and internationalization. What they produced was a prototype that allows users to interact with a web-based user interface, click on it, and edit the text values in that UI for a specific language. Then, a community manager could go through the list of possible internationalized edits and approve or disapprove of them, filtering out porn, spam, etc. The idea here is that the community of people could help to internationalize software and open source much easier and cheaper in a decentralized way, bringing software to languages that might be hard to achieve without community involvement.

The final project was called Event in a Box. This was generated by the fact that we want to provide an easy way for someone to specify an event, what their needs are for that event, and for the site to automatically contact all the appropriate sites to help promote and inform others on the event, such as Backpack, Craigslist, etc. In addition, the page would generate a machine readable description of the event using HCalendar (using code from Ryan King that was refactored). I put up a demo and a download of the package (note that the prototype currently says that it is contacting lots of third party services, like BackBase and Craigslist, when in fact it's not; we only had about 2 1/2 hours to do all of this, and put that UI handwaving in :)

All in all it was an amazing event! Thanks to everyone who came; thanks to Chris Messina for organizing everyone and getting them together; thanks to Ning for sponsoring our lunch; and thanks to Spiral Muse for hosting the Coworking space!

We're trying to make a permanent space that is larger than coworking to support even more of these events; email me if you have ideas on how to support such a mission.