Such a busy season: hackathons, hacks, and meetups

Hackathons

Over the past few months we have been involved in some great events going on around the community. For hackathons alone we have have been involved in the title="datadive" target="_blank">DataKind DataDive HackNY Princeton Hack Hack Film Tow Center Mapathon EcoHack and SanHack. That's not it over this past weekend we were simultaneously an API partner at the NYTimes Hackday event and giving presentations at WhereCamp in Berlin. We have to say we really love hackathons because we get to see many of our favorite faces from the community come together to invent and improve all sorts of incredible projects.

We are actually part of a small team that puts together the EcoHack hackathon here in New York City. If you haven't heard of EcoHack it is a hackathon to bring environmental scientists together with developers designers engineers writers and anybody interested in solving real challenges going on in science and conservation. This year we had 190 people sign-up and who knows how many cycle through during the 2 day event! EcoHack had about 10 different teams working like crazy to develop projects that make a better world. A couple of highlights include

• A makeover for [dontflush.me]
• Numerous visualizations of insects including collection through time
• Special guest [hacks from #BikeNYC]
• Microbe [sampling hacking]
• many many others.

We couldn't be more pleased with the group of people involved and it is always exciting to meet the people out there really passionate about the world around them.

Hacks

Even outside of hackathons and work here at CartoDB we get wrapped up in exciting ideas all the time actually. It seems like someone on our team is always tweeting about some new project or other that they hacked together over the weekend. Maybe you caught the recent compilation of Rolling Stones' tours through the decades visualized with CartoDB.

We have another really fun one coming for you on Friday so stay tuned!

Meetups

There are so many people in the community constantly making cool things all the time. We find one of the best ways to find out about them is by being involved in community meetup groups. We help organize the NYC GIS meetup here in the city. We just had our meeting on Monday and it was great! We got to show off some of our favorite new features in CartoDB 2.0. We also heard about what John Keefe and his team have been up to with their maps over at WNYC.

There is another meetup coming up on Friday Geoinquietos. It is the first title="Geoinquietos" target="_blank">Geo meetup in Madrid Spain and we'll be hosting it in our office so if you are interested in hearing what other people in the area are working on come on by!

Whew crazy couple months right? No matter the CartoDB team has been really grateful to you all for involving us in so many cool projects. Keep ‘em coming and if you’re working on something you’d like to share send it to comms@cartodb.com.