My proposal is to host an old-school hackfest, covering technologies useful for humanist inquiry. These would be beginner-to-intermediate friendly, though if there is interest, we could also do a much deeper dive in to any one of these areas. These are some ideas, but would love to hear if others have ideas they would like to explore.

NodeJS

There is a lot of excitement in various developer communities for a new server-side JavaScript platform named node.js. Built on the Google v8 JavaScript runtime, node.js allows developers to quickly write real-time applications using an evented model. This session will take a look at how one interesting Node application (HUBOT) is constructed, the technologies used, how it’s deployed, and how it can be extended to implement an IRC bot.

HTML5 Technologies

HTML 5 is a buzz word a lot of people talk about, but few actually know what it is. This session would take a look at HTML 5 technologies (e.g. webGL, canvas, audio, video), and how people are beginning to use these components in interesting ways, and perhaps even put them together in a browser-based action game.

Omeka Plugin Development

Have an idea for a plugin for Omeka? Don’t know where to start? Stuck somewhere? This session would explain the basics of how Omeka’s plugin architecture works, how to get going, and some tricks we’ve learned along the way developing Neatline (and other) plugins.

Ruby Zotero gem

At last year’s THATCampVA, we started hacking on a Ruby gem to allow developers to work with the Zotero APIs. I started to refactor this code to work on the 1.9.3 MRI and use a modular HTTP transport mechanism. This session would hack on adding features and working on the code refactor. You can check out the code on Github. If we’re really ambitious, we could even hack on the node client I began experimenting with.