Features
Roundup Event Roundup, Sept 24
- By Erika Owens
Hacks/Hackers Mexico City meets tonight and looking ahead to conferences in October.
Interview A few words from Chrys Wu on her new role
This week, Hacks/Hackers co-founder Chrys Wu joined the New York Times Developers team as a Developer Advocate.
Project Model Analysis
The New York Times’ Erik Hinton breaks down a Fashion Week colorbar special feature with bonus fancy math.
Roundup Event Roundup, Sept 16
- By Erika Owens
Tonight, Hacks/Hackers New York City hosts an encryption training, Dublin has its first H/H meetup, and the ONA chapter in Portland talks Twitter and ethics.
Project Complex But Not Dynamic
- By Jeremy Bowers
- Jeremy Bowers, Danny DeBelius, Christopher Groskopf, Alyson Hurt, Gerald Rich, Matt Stiles
- NPR
We usually build relatively simple sites with our app template. Our accessible playgrounds project needed to be more complex. We needed to deal with moderated, user-generated data. But we didn’t have to go full server in order to make this site work; we just modified our app template.
Update Call for Submissions
With the hustle of fall around the corner, we’re keener than ever to bring your projects and hard-won lessons to light. As always, we welcome your write-ups and code index entries—and we’re also inviting you to something new.
Project All About Reporter
The Wall Street Journal’s Jeremy Singer-Vine recently released Reporter, an open source tool that makes it easy to hide and reveal the code behind common forms of data visualization presented on the web. We spoke with him about the tool’s makeup, design goals, and future development plan.
Roundup Event Roundup, Sept 9
- By Erika Owens
Chicas Poderosas hits Bogotá this week, with a hackathon on Friday. Hacks/Hackers events in New York and Vienna.
Interview ProPublica’s Jeff Larson on the NSA Crypto Story
- By Erin Kissane, Scott Klein, Jeff Larson
- James Ball, Julian Borger, Scott Klein, Jeff Larson, Nicole Perlroth, Scott Shane
- ProPublica, The Guardian, The New York Times
We sat down with ProPublica’s contributor to the story, Jeff Larson—with an assist from news apps editor Scott Klein—to talk about the tech involved and why the story needed someone from the team affectionately called the news nerds.
Roundup Event Roundup, Sept 3
- By Erika Owens
Meetup season starts back up in September. Check out upcoming events throughout the U.S. and Europe.
Tool Mapping Made Simple, Now with Bonus UI
Introducing the double-whammy of Simple Map D3 and Tulip, a new mapping app from MinnPost.
Roundup Event Roundup, Aug 26
- By Erika Owens
The Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires Media Party is finally here: news devs from around the world are gathering in Argentina this weekend. Plus, this week is your last chance to submit proposals to the Mozilla Festival.
Tool Introducing Ractive.js
Ractive.js is a new JavaScript library for making interactives and news apps. Tl;dr: Ractive.js will make your life easier! Check out the examples and tutorials. (But really, you probably want to read this first.)
Roundup Event Roundup, Aug 19
- By Erika Owens
Meetups this week in Boston, Berlin, DC, and San Francisco. Plus intro HTML and CSS training from the Codewithme folks in NYC before the Asian American Journalists Association convention.
Tool Introducing csvdedupe
Introducing csvdedupe, an open source command line tool for de-duplication and entity resolution.
Roundup Event Roundup, Aug 12
- By Erika Owens
This Saturday is the last day to apply to the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship, plus Django hacking with jail data in Chicago.
Tool Responsive CSS Testing Made Simple with the BBC’s Wraith
- By David Blooman, John Cleveley, Erin Kissane, Simon Thulbourn
- David Blooman, John Cleveley, Simon Thulbourn
- BBC News
Last November, the BBC News team created a front-end regression tool that collects and diffs screenshots to automatically highlight discrepancies produced (intentionally or otherwise) by CSS changes. Last week, the team open-sourced Wraith. We spoke with David Blooman, who developed the tool last fall and worked with Simon Thulbourn to prepare it for public release.
Project Fast Hacks: Harnessing Google tools for crowdsourced mapping
On his second day at KPCC, Chris Keller and team wanted to build a crowdsourced map of experiences at the polls. Here’s how they did it and what they learned for the next election day.
Roundup Event Roundup, Aug 5
- By Erika Owens
This week is quiet, which leaves you plenty of time to prepare session proposals for the Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires Media Party, Mozilla Festival, and PyCon.
Tool Ultralight CMSes Head to Head
Ultralight CMSes are, in many ways, the product of hacking or infecting the CMS. Here’s a breakdown of a few popular ones, complete with setup instructions, pro/cons, and newsroom case studies.
