Automatticians, the individuals who construct WordPress.com, take part in occasions and tasks all over the world day by day. Periodically, they report again on the thrilling issues they do locally. This week, I share my expertise on the Codex Hackathon.
We’re massive followers of publishing right here at WordPress.com. From fantastic content created by our running a blog group and information from our WordPress.com VIP partners, to longform articles on Longreads, we love serving to publish one of the best content material on the web.
In that spirit, Automattic sponsored the Codex Hackathon final month. The occasion introduced collectively over 160 people who find themselves captivated with studying to the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, MA. Librarians, writers, editors, programmers, and designers got here from all throughout the globe to collaborate on small weekend-long tasks to visualise the way forward for studying. Mel Choyce, Kelly Dwan, Kat Hagan, and I attended from Automattic, and we have been keen to satisfy and collaborate with the like-minded crowd. It’s not typically that such a various group has the chance to drop the whole lot and are available collectively round one thing they love.
Photograph by Elisa Mala
The weekend kicked off with a collection of brief shows on Saturday morning. Attendees discovered about instruments (just like the WordPress.com API!) and noticed examples of publishing challenges for inspiration. These of us who got here with pre-imagined challenge concepts shared them with the group, and people who didn’t might both be a part of a group, or take part in a brainstorming train. The attendees mingled and shared concepts, and undertaking groups began forming.
I joined a staff, whereas Mel, Kelly, and Kat pitched in with design and improvement assist throughout many various tasks. The remainder of Saturday was spent assembly new individuals, brainstorming, sketching, designing, and writing code. Our Codex hosts stored us well-fed all through, and the environment was thrilling and galvanizing. Groups labored properly into the night on Saturday, and have been up vibrant and early on Sunday to shine our tasks.
Photograph by Elisa Mala
The occasion culminated in a set of brief shows from every workforce. It was thrilling to see the totally different concepts individuals labored on. Because of the extremely brief weekend timeline, many tasks have been nonetheless within the conceptual part, however we have been handled to fairly a couple of software demos as nicely. You’ll be able to take a look at the complete listing of tasks on the Codex Hackathon 2016 projects page. A few of my private favorites:
- Stanza: A device to ship a playlist of poems tied to an individual’s temper and emotion.
- LitCity: Literary context, delivered into the actual world via location-based telephone notifications.
- Cover Design History: The beginnings of an internet site devoted to ebook cowl design.
- HippoReader: A software for programmatically simplifying the language in a given textual content, to make it readable even by these with a elementary English language expertise.
- ReadMember: A web-browser extension that will help you hold monitor of the belongings you learn on-line.
All of us had a blast on the occasion, and completely loved working with everybody. The Codex Hackathon left us impressed to maintain constructing methods so that you can publish your personal nice content material right here at WordPress.com and past.
Take a look at the Codex Hackathon website to maintain updated on extra Codex occasions, and skim by way of our getting started guide for those who’d like to start out constructing one thing cool with the WordPress.com API.
If constructing publishing instruments for a extra democratic net seems like your concept of enjoyable, we’re hiring!
