After a couple of years of being offline and inactive, we are making efforts to bring FridayHacks back online. We have been updating Ruby and other Jekyll dependencies and we have been able to fix some issues blocking us from posting.

We want to continue our original mission of trying out and explorining different technologies on Friday nights with the purpose of learning and discovery. We have not been consistent with this goal these past years, it is has been mainly associated with a lack of organization and planning. One of the important points to highlight is that we will try to be more organized and try to schedule sessions in advanced. We have an extensive list of projects and ideas we want to try, and we have not been able to cross any item of the list. We want to change that this year. We are excited to slowly bring this site to its full momentum and we will include livestreams in the near future.

Time to build.

In today’s hack, we decided to build an application that will help future editions of Friday Hacks. Basically, the application lets you propose projects to work on. Then, users will be able to upvote or downvote ideas and then allows to form teams to work on the best ideas.

After the hacking event is finished, projects are ranked by points. As a reward system, points could be exchanged for free working hours. For instance, after reaching enough points, it could be exchanged for a day off.

Here is the basic prototype:

It is a simple Django application with a login system, coupled with a Postgres database. There are 3 models:

• Team Model: Model for creating teams. A user joins a team.
• Project model: Model for proposed projects. A project has a team associated with it
• Rank Model: Model for reward system. Projects and teams are ranked and get points

Basic UI:

The application is still very basic and contains some minor errors. Next week, we hope to continue working on mechanical details such as

• Project and Team proposals
• Matching algorithm for projects and teams
• reddit-like upvote/downvote system for proposed projects.
• Ranking system and point allocation for projects and teams

Today, we built a slide presentation template using the Reveal.js framework. This framework is great for HTML-based presentations and it is a great hack for any technical speaker for the following reasons:

1) It is browser-based: you don’t need Power Point or Keynote to deliver your presentation (but you would need an internet connection)
2) Is is great for showing code: you can display code in a nice and concise way
3) It has an additional functionality: you can move up/down and left-right. So, you can better define the sections of your presentation
4) It is highly customizable: you can add bell and whistles or all sorts in custom css and js files.

Here is the template:

Basically, every slide is a considered a section: <section> I am a slide </section>, and then you can treat every single slide as a HTML page.

Today’s hack is about turning Friday Hacks’ boring static Github Pages website into a more dynamic blogging platform powered by Jekyll. In order to do that, I set to find a sample template that would fit the style and content of this site. The HPSTR theme by mmistakes was the perfect fit

Before

FridayHacks website, using static Github Pages

After

FridayHacks website, using HPSTR Jekyll theme

First, I had to fork the HPSTR repository, cloned it on my sandbox, and installed dependencies with

 bundle install

Then, I modified certain files such as _config.yml and navigation.yml, and I also did a bit of clean up (removed sample blog posts and unused pictures).

Now, every time I want to add a new post, I add it to the _posts folder with a .md extension. Then, need to test it in localhost by changing url parameter in the _config.yml file to serve in localhost instead of the fridayhacks.com url:

 url: #http://fridayhacks.com

Then, I need to run the following commands:

 bundle exec jekyll build
 bundle exec jekyll serve

If all goes well, I uncomment the url in the _config.yml file and push it directly to Github.

In today’s hack, we worked on giving the OpenNEAR project some color and personality. We started by creating a simple logo with the awesome website LogoMakr

The basic logo now looks like this

It is simple and elegant. Then, we built a simple website using Bootstrap and Github pages. Nothing too complicated. It is very simple static website:

Now the have some small branding going on, it is time to get to work and get things done.

Credits: Check out the new logo that I created on LogoMakr.com https://logomakr.com/4s50NM