Neal Shyam

I’ve used pretty much every instant message & team collaboration tool ever (AIM, ICQ, IRC, Sametime, HipChat, etc.) and these days it’s all about Slack.

People often ask me why, if I love coding so much, I haven’t pursued a career in software development.

This was the first half of my Friday night: Build an awesome web apps with Python and Flask Add an API to my app because Flask is so awesome Deploy my app & API to Heroku and make them public Neat right?

There are lots of ways for an application to get your current location (latitude / longitude) programmatically, but wifi-triangulate is a little shady.

Check this out, it’s a heart rate monitor, built in JavaScript, using your webcam, in a hundred lines of code!

One of the key concepts behind version control systems (like git or mercurial), is the differential or “diff.”

Control-c and Control-v were the first keyboard shortcuts I ever learned, (quickly followed by Control-Alt-Delete).

Stethoscopes, basic listening devices, enable doctors to diagnose tons of medical conditions.

In the 90s I made my dad buy me a book about smileys.

Passwords are the worst and you’re probably terrible at them.

Discounting all of the masturbatory “think pieces,” I think Medium has been massively successful because of its UI/UX.

I really like how Slack, Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp expand links, adding context and putting the focus on the main content.

Here’s an abridged history of my experience with fractals: 1992 Pops introduces me to the Mandelbrot set, Chaos Theory, and how everything keeps iterating as you zoom in.

I recently bought an Amazon Echo and I’ve been having a lot of fun asking Alexa to tell me about the weather, play my favorite songs, and set timers in the kitchen—all hands free.

I don’t care for the lotto, but I do love scratch off games like McDonald’s Monopoly.

Billing itself as “a cool way to use natural language in JavaScript,” NLP Compromise is a simple interface for NLP that you can use in the browser or server side.

Hackathons are neat, but there’s some really exciting code coming out of game jams like Ludum Dare.

Back in the 80s, Ted Turner scandalized the film world by colorizing tons of classic films.

I went to an arcade on Sunday and mashed buttons until my hands were sore.

I simultaneously love & hate Microsoft Excel.

There are literally thousands of RPG software projects on GitHub.

If you’ve ever left your iPhone in a cab, you know what a life saver iCloud and Find My iPhone are.

This week’s project, webaudio-serial-tx, let’s your phone (or any computer with a headphone jack) transmit serial data to hardware like an Arduino.

I’ve been working with a lot of forms recently and I am in love with the placeholder attribute.

Have you ever made that “OMG I thought it was on mute!”

Now that HTML5 video & .mp4 are well supported across browsers, you don’t need YouTube in order to add video to my web projects.

There are two big things that’ll get your hacker card pulled: Running as root Storing your API keys or passwords in git When Linux first gained popularity on the desktop, RaR was rampant.

Thanks to the proliferation of Square card readers & POS terminals, signing for purchases on iPads and email receipts are the norm in Brooklyn.

Are computer viruses still a thing?

When I switched to iOS, it took me a while to get used to the new Force and 3D touch features.

When I was searching for Kindle hacks, I came across Nick White’s getxbook project, which enables you to download entire books from Google, Amazon (Look Inside previews), and Barnes & Noble.

Progress bars are a key component of graphical user interfaces.

I once read a story about a fancy robotic parking garage.

FYI, I’m on vacation in Costa Rica, so this is the last Git@Me of 2015.

Here’s a real #firstworldproblem: every afternoon, I receive Dave Pell’s excellent NextDraft newsletter and add the articles to my Pocket queue, so I can read them on the subway.

One of the best parts of GitHub is forking.

I follow (roughly) a zillion people on GitHub, so things bubble up pretty quickly in my feed.

I’m a sucker for a great hackathon mashup.

I was originally going to write about a Python utility that scans PDFs for links to other PDFs and downloads them.

JSON is the lingua franca of APIs.

In Slack, everyone’s favorite office chat time waster, you can post gifs really easily: But Twitter, for all it’s memey-ness, makes you upload gifs manually, like it’s 2013 or something.

After publishing the first episode of The Commit, Devpost’s new video podcast on YouTube, Richard and I went all out with new mics, a mixer, pro lights, and some awesome guests.

This week’s project, WearShare is one of the neatest smartwatch apps I’ve ever seen.

Computer graphics programming is hard.

cat is a great command line utility.

I found a really great repo this week, so I’ll dispense with the intro patter.

On my flight to Ann Arbor last Saturday, (yay MHacks 6!)

While digging through GitHub this week, I found a fun repo that takes advantage of Apple’s CoreLocation API.

We did it, today marks two full years of Git@Me!

Next week is Git@Me’s second anniversary.