On Saturday April 14th, 2012, Terence and Myself participated in our third HackDays event, HackTO. While we didn’t do as well as previous events I still had a great time. Here’s a few thoughts on the event.

Name: 2xIPA
Brewery: Southern Tier
Style: Double India Pale Ale
ABV: 8.2% (Varies from year to year)

Not quite an imperial, but certainly not a standard India pale ale. Southern Tier’s double IPA is a hop lovers dream. Citrusy and clean with an incredible finish. This was my first beer from Southern Tier and it’s what made me fall in love with their brewery.

I’m proud to announce my first ever open source framework, Jeeves. Jeeves helps you make new IRC bots in a single click. It handles all of the mundane things like connecting, joining and messaging and allows you to focus on creating the functionality you want from your bot.

The framework is built in Python, adding new commands is as simple as writing your own plugin (examples are included). You can pick up the framework from here and the README file should be everything you need to get started.

It all started when I was reading about a few different IRC bots made in Python and I thought to myself, “It should be easier to spin up new bots”. I wrote the first version of Jeeves in a week, modeling it’s usage after Django.

I’ll continue to post updates, changes and features on this blog. If you’d like to contribute plugins or improvements feel free to contact me here or through Github.

One of the best ways to continue learning is to take part in hackathons. You’re thrown into a group of developers and told to make something with a limited amount of time. Sometimes you’re provided with APIs or a specific instruction set on what to make and other times it’s up to you. I’ve always found that the stress of figuring something out over a short period of time helps me learn better.

HackTO is a hackathon in Toronto where developers are given 7 hours to make something built off of the provided APIs. The first HackTO was hosted at Tineye’s headquarters and my team, @ashchristopher, @terencelo and myself won it using YellowAPI. This time around I’m hoping to make something that’s both useful and creative.

I’ve always enjoyed going to meetups, conferences and other tech events and lately I’ve wanted to give back to these communities by giving talks on things I found interested. The problem is, I always worried that what I found interesting other people would find boring. I would think of great talk ideas but always chicken out at the last-minute out of fear that people wouldn’t want to listen to what I had to say.

After thinking of this problem for a few days I came to a solution that I think works well. I’m going to create talks on the most popular content from this blog. Here are a few reasons why I’m going to do this.