Thanks to Nick for catching me doing what I do best… checking e-mail. A big thanks to the organizers and other sponsors of BarcampDC3. It was a great experience for everyone, and it’s hard to believe that this is the the third one, organized by essentially the same group of people. Startup Metrics for Pirates – Jared dug in depth one of the most important concepts of the...
It’s hard to believe that a little over two years ago, the first Barcamp was held – being my first foray into the DC tech community. It was a life-changing experience, as it’s where I met all the people I work with on a daily basis, inspire me, and genuinely consider my friends. I’ll be speaking/organizing on two main topics: Freelancing After years of moonlighting before...
I’ve had the chance to meet Ondi Timoner, the director, and watch the documentary. Amazing view of what our “sharing” and “transparency” can lead to.
And we built a widget for the movie!
The DC 311 application I built and Zach designed received an Honorable Mention in the Apps for Democracy competition!
Read my full post at my other blog
I had a need for switching back and forth between two different values in a hidden input field. I couldn’t find any decent plugins to achieve this, so I wrote a little jQuery plugin to handle this.
Download here. Using it is dead simple, just pass in the two values you want to toggle between.
[javascript]$("#element").toggleValue("true","false"); [/javascript]
Three things really stand out about the current Iranian conflict. 1. User generated content is easily able to slip through any blocks that the government puts in place over traditional media. Journalists were locked in hotels in the dark, while a protester sitting on a balcony can snap pictures and post on Flickr/YouTube/Twitter/Blogs. 2. Instead of new media sources being used to highlight...
Background: The DC government is exposing an API for their 311 call center, to allow application developers to build open source tools to make it easier for citizens to submit issues. As part of it, they and iStrategyLabs have launched a second Apps for Democracy contest. The creative juices are flowing, and I have a few ideas I plan on implementing. But first things first… in order to make...
Last weekend, a few dozen developers gathered together at Viget’s beautiful offices in Reston to… talk nerdy. Out of all the conferences I’ve been to, it was one of the best. It was directly honed on developers, and all talks were targeted as such. That meant no talks about marketing, gov 2.0, branding, public relations, blogging, twitter, or anything else social media/PR, etc...
Wait — what? Every PHP Web Developer, or any other kind of web developer, has, at one point, butted heads with ImageMagick, or its inferior nemesis, GD. We’ve tussled with setup and installation, debugged scripts, and stolen code, but rarely do we look to it for anything beyond generating a thumbnail or resizing an image. Armed with nothing more than the native manual, I started...
Entrepreneurship – at least for tech-minded folk – is more often than not omitted from curriculum in college. As I was finishing up my degree at the University of Maryland, it was assumed that everyone there would go to work for one or another government contractor or large enterprise, who would dominate job fairs with huge flashy booths and t-shirts. That’s all the...