Hackaday NYC Bot workshop recap (hosted by @Sophi Kravitz and @Shayna)

Pictured below is Jenn Schiffer, who presented at the meetup (right).

We enjoyed a different format this month- a weekend daytime meetup at Fat Cat Fab Lab in the West Village area of Manhattan. The meetup was workshop-style, with four speakers who presented about some of the internet bots and tools they’ve designed and worked on. After the presentations, they stuck around to help people get started coding their own internet “toys”.

Hackaday NYC format is to have presentations happening in a hack-friendly environment, and Fat Cat Fab Lab did not disappoint. Fat Cat is fully equipped with laser cutter, soldering stations, and lots of room to build. Across the hall, a lock-picking class was being given, and many people went back and forth between the two events sharing what they were working on. Make sure to join us next month for more awesome presentations and hacking on-site!

Our first presenter, Brian Moore, works on all kinds of games and bots, including the Golden Ratio twitterbot, projects using machine learning, and games including political parodies.

#FreezeFrameBot tweets youtube videos 10x a day and favorite movie tropes.

Brian's bot @ChernobylStatus times how long it will take for Chernobyl to be safe again. Hint: it will take 3,000 years.

Jenn Schiffer was up next. Jenn is an engineer at Glitch, a platform that helps people build web apps. Jenn famously built the 8-bit internet toy Make 8-bit Art which receives 1000 visitors daily!


Leonard Richardson then spoke about some of his open source work including the hugely popular Beautiful Soup library for webscraping, and olipy, which allows for font-hacking!


Our final speaker of the day was Luis Queral, who talked about his completely self sustainable record label.


During the break, we had our Hackaday show and tell. This part of the meetup is always well received and we love to see everything you all are working on! Pictured below is Gregg's Counter Driver.
This project is a modular electronic controller to advance an electromechanical counter via a solid state relay. The counter accepts requests from a logic gate and a Netduino. Cool!

Sidepocket stopped in from the Pride NYC parade to say hi. Ah, that 2014 Hackaday Prize T-shirt makes us nostalgic.


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RSVP on Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/MakeIt-NYC/events/240479049/

Come and make your own chat + twitter bot (and possibly play with some JS robotics. We do love hardware, after all).

We'll be featuring presentations, demos and tutorials by bot makers. All experience levels are welcome! Newbies will be able to get their feet wet right away.

Intermediate + experienced folks are highly encouraged to attend! Get some inspiration for your next project, share your knowledge & enjoy a fun afternoon of bots, hacks & snacks.

Stay tuned for more details regarding speakers + tutorial offerings!

If you would like to show off your own projects or give a brief tutorial on your preferred tools + processes, please be in touch with Shayna!

Speaking || Teaching:


Jenn Schiffer is Community Engineer for Glitch.com at Fog Creek. Along with making art and jokes and apps, she runs the web developer meetup JerseyScript in Jersey City and co-emcees/organizes BrooklynJS. She is incredibly strong and runs very fast

Jenn will give a talk + demo on her work, process, and Glitch.

Leonard Richardson is a software developer and science fiction author. He works for the New York Public Library on SimplyE, a project to improve the experience of borrowing ebooks from public libraries. He wrote the Beautiful Soup screen-scraping library for Python.

Leonard enjoys talking about the creative things people do for fun. He’ll speak about computerized art that is doing interesting things with narrative, interactivity, and language.

Brian Moore is a creative technologist whose work is often best described as "taking new, amazing technologies and applying them in the dumbest ways possible." He loves playing with hardware, machine learning, and bots.

Luis Queral is a product designer and visual artist focusing on algorithmic and generative works.

Stay tuned for additional speakers and details!