Dev5Projects


Register your project for the DevHouse Boston 5 event.

 

The secret password for editing this page is D3vB0st0n! including the exclamation point at the end.

 

Step 1: Copy the following text.

 

 **Name:** Your Name Here
 **Email:** you@somesite.com
 **Project Idea:** All about your project idea...
 **Skills Needed:** Skills needed to complete the project.

 

Step 2: Edit this page add it to the list of projects.

 

Projects:

 

Name: Jason Morrison

Email: jason.p.morrison@gmail.com

Project Idea: SmartLab: fuse multitouch, augmented reality, and cheap sensors with benchtop lab science.

Skills Needed: Soldering gun toting, code slinging, multitouch-and-physical-computing-savvy, HCI-loving future-thinkers. Or raw enthusiasm, or any crossover thereof.

 

Name: Jason Morrison

Email: jason.p.morrison@gmail.com

Project Idea: Bioweathermap.org mashup: If someone collected genetic sequences swabbed from public areas around the globe, and published a feed with the sequences, locations, and tons of metadata, what would you do with that?

Skills Needed: Moxie, charm, basic bioinformatics savvy, any programming abilities you see fit.

 

Name: Mac Cowell

Email: mac@diybio.org

Project Idea: I have about 50gb of textbooks and papers in pdf format. I would very much like to work on a utility that makes this massive amount of virtual paper easier to read and to share with 1,000 of my friends. Moral Claim: Exposure to 50gbs of educational knowledge is an inspiring, galvanizing, viscerally educational experience. You cannot avoid learning something. Helping the people share this knowledge would undoubtedly make the world a better place. Let's build something foundational for http://guerillaopenaccess.com/. Let's:

  1. Make it easier to share pdfs - by building a web platform for sharing arbitrary pdfs. A place that will store persistent information - comments and torrents and images and metadata for a particular pdf - and help connect someone with that pdf, wherever it is. A place that all but firehoses the complete library of congress directly into a users brain via the incredible diffusion gradient present. A hypemachine for PDFs. Or we could...
  2. Make it easier to read pdfs - because reading pdfs on a monitor sucks. I want to read them on some kind of ebook-like device. So, let's: A) make an instructable and provide support software for transforming a junker laptop into a dedicated DIY ebook reader; or B) build a website frontend for the best open-source conversion programs (pdf->tiff?) needed to convert pdfs into whatever format is actually usable on today's ebook readers (this could funnel content into project #1); or C) figure out how to make the OLPC the best ebook reader in the world.

Skills Needed: moral outrage at the walled garden we let the educational publishing industry build. the guts to do something about it. experience with clouds. perhaps with OLPCs.

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Name: Mac Cowell

Email: mac@diybio.org

Project Idea: Art of the Playlist - a website for concurrently listening, controlling, and organizing a playlist with your friends. Short version: Concurrent wiki playlists. Use case: I am at my desk in boston and want to listen to music all day while I am working. I spend a lot of time making the ideal autumn monday playlist. I want to listen to this with my friends as well, who perhaps work down the street or across the country. Anyone who navigates to the playlist's url begins hearing the same song in roughly the same place as all other listeners. These visitors can also optionally control the playlist, reorganize it, and add new songs to it.

Skills Needed: flash, actionscript, shoutcast, icecast, Apache, ruby or python experience

 

Name: Dan Grover

Email: dan@dangrover.com

Project Idea: I've been screwing around a little with an experimental language I'm designing called Tuplet. It's a way to describe music in a high level manner. It compiles down to MIDI format. However, despite music-specific syntax and features, it has most of the functionality you'd expect in a programming language, for the purpose of being able to algorithmically *generate* music in Tuplet. It is also functional. I've worked a little bit on it so far, the parser/lexer is generated by ANTLR (antlr.org) from a formal grammar. I'm pretty new to this language design/implementation stuff....taking a class now on the topic.

Skills Needed: Java (or other ANTLR-supported target language), music knowledge, programming language experience a plus

 

Name: Ivan Kirigin

Email: ivan@tipjoy.com

Project Idea: I'm going to build a Django project in Google App Engine. It should be pretty straight forward to setup. It would also be interesting to build a container for Facebook Connect. I doubt the pages I build will be of general interest, but if you've been meaning to make a simple app on GAE, make it at the same time I make mine. It should make things smoother. After the site launches, we make cyborg soldering robots using genetic algorithms and wikis.

Skills Needed: Python, Django, http://letmegooglethatforyou.com

 

Name: Nate Aune

Email: natea (at) jazkarta (dot) com

Project Idea: Gigblastr.com is a tool to promote events to multiple event services. Gigblastr is a Django app running on Google App Engine (GAE). We have support for Upcoming.org, Eventful.com and Twitter, and at the DevHouseBoston we'd like to add Facebook and MySpace support. If anyone wants to help with this or just help out in general UI improvements. http://gigblastr.com