Intro to Hacks/HackersIRE + Q&A With Jeremy Ashkenas

http://photos3.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/8/1/8/event_55862072.jpegIn the two years since DocumentCloud (http://documentcloud.org)'s founding, Jeremy Ashkenas & Sam Clay (http://www.samuelclay.com/) have managed to build several world class software projects with the aim of making both journalism and software development better.

DocumentCloud was founded as a platform for Hacks to publish and analyze primary source documents, whether they're scanned pdfs or natively digital Word documents (http://www.documentcloud.org/help/uploading). DocumentCloud makes them searchable and provides an annotation framework, which can be seen in use in newsrooms around the world including places like The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/interactive/2011/jul/07/phone-hacking-newsoftheworld)'s News of the World coverage.

Javascript developers are likely familiar with Backbone.js (http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/), and Underscore.js (http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/), as well as Jeremy's personal project, Coffeescript (http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/). But for the Hacks out there, Jeremy's tools help Hackers manage and simplify typically tangled web browser code, and are used on quite a lot of sites around the web (http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#examples).

Jeremy is now working for one of DocumentCloud's founders at The New York Times as a news apps developer.

We'll talk with Jeremy, introduce what Hacks/Hackers is about (http://hackshackers.com/about/) and why Jeremy's a good example of the Hacks/Hacker spirit. We'd love to have you!