This past week was a busy one – I spent the weekend participating in PayPal’s Battle Hack Miami Hackathon. It was a great experience – those guys really now how to put together an event.
Hackathon article from the Miami Herald
Pretty nice summary of the festivities. I didn’t take home a battle axe, but it was still quite rewarding. Shout out to my teammates, Serdar Karatekin (@tre3notas), Ben Aiken, and Wenjin Zhou (@wenjinzhou).
Parse
You probably heard of Parse, particularly because the company was acquired by Facebook a few months back. It’s a backend as a service, which is incredibly easy to setup and use. If iCloud doesn’t fit your needs, it’s definitely worth checking out.
Node Parse plugin
So we were able to get Parse talking with PayPal via a Node.js server. Here’s the plugin that made that pretty quick and easy.
MIDI turns 30, happy birthday!
I’m a huge MIDI fan – if it weren’t for MIDI, we pretty much wouldn’t have electronic or pop music. This is an in-depth piece on the history of the Musical Instrument Digital Interface.
Part 1
Part 2
App acquired by the Smithsonian as a work of art
Planetary is a beautiful implementation of an interesting concept: explore your iTunes music library as if it’s a universe of planets and constellations. It’s not new, but the code was just acquired by an art museum, which I think is pretty cool. Even better is that they’re open-sourcing it.
Skoop
Some of my previous colleagues are behind this new nutritional product and website. Seems like food startups are all the rage. Anyways, the site’s great – a nice example of tastefully applied HTML 5.
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