GT ACM

There are two Zynga info sessions this week:

1) Thursday, March 4 at 11:00am in Skiles Bldg, Room 002

2) Friday, March 5 at 12:00pm (noon) in Klaus 2447.
(We’ll have Chic-fil-a)

Zynga is the company behind games like Farmville, Mafia Wars, Yoville, and many others – they’re the number one social gaming company in the world, and their games are played by more than 200 million active users each month.

Bring your resume!

It’s that time of the year again! Yahoo! and GTACM are once again bringing you Hack Week – a week of great presentations, competition, and good clean geek fun. This year’s Hack Week will take place from March 9 – 13th; you can find a full listing of the planned events below. These events are also on our Google Calendar for your subscribing pleasure. Yahoo!’s official HackU page, which has details about the program, info from past events, and other cool hack stuff  is http://developer.yahoo.com/hacku.

Stay tuned here and via our twitter feed for updates.

Thursday, March 4

Pre-Hack U Event: Intro to Hack

The prequel to Hack Week! Specifically targeted at first time hackers, people who can’t make the kickoff event, and anyone searching for team members. Come hear what Hack Week is all about, meet fellow hack wizards, and hear from some of our past entrants – and winners! Come enjoy the food, listen a bit, and then hang out with other Hack Stars.

Location: Klaus 1116
Time: 6:00pm
Food: Dinner (Calzones!)
Giveaways: iPod Shuffle Raffle!

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Tuesday, March 9

Hack U Kickoff

The official start of the week! Come hear what Hack Week is all about, see just how easy it is for you to make an entry that could win you amazing prices, and get your first taste of the great hack culture that will be here all week!

Location: Klaus Atrium
Time: 6:15pm
Food: Dinner (Moe’s)
Giveaways: Hack U t-shirts, Y! swag & Raffle prize

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Wednesday, March 10

Event: Open Tech Lunch

Come hear about some cool APIs, technologies, frameworks, etc – all centered around open development culture! Also, see demos of how to use them in your hacks. It’s a great chance to learn from those who know it best. Update: Chris’s slides are here.
Location: CoC Third Floor (Follow the Arrows!)
Time: 11:30- 1PM
Food: Yes – lunch (BBQ)

Event: Office Hours + Informal Talks

Location: CoC Commons
Time: 1:30PM – 4PM
Schedule:
1:30- 2:30: How to Hosting / Joyent + PHP
2:30 – 3:30 : How to Javascript / YUI
3:30 – 4 : How to Webservice / YQL

Food: Lunch: Firehouse Subs

Event: Guest Lecture: Douglas Crockford: Javascript the Good Parts (part 2)

Come hear from the creator of JSON as he continues his discussion of some of the most common pitfalls in JavaScript, how to avoid them, and how to best take advantage of this powerful, pertinent, and prevalent language.

Location: Klaus 1116
Time: 6:15pm
Food: Dinner: Chick-Fil-A

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Thursday, March 11

Event: Hadoop Talk

Want to get technical? Hadoop is a free framework for working with extremely large data-sets and distributed operations. It’s even been used in past hacks – come hear how you can get started making something that could scale like crazy!

Location: Van Leer Auditorium (W200)
Time: 11:30AM-12:30
Food: Lunch: Firehouse Subs

Event: Office Hours + Informal Talks

Location: CoC Commons
Time: 1PM – 4PM
Schedule:
1- 2: How to Hosting / Joyent + PHP
2- 3: How to Javascript / YUI
3- 4 : How to Webservice / YQL

Event: YUI / UED / Design

Location: Klaus 1116
Time: 6:15pm
Food: Dinner – Italian/Pasta
Giveaways: YDN T-shirts, stickers, swag

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Friday, March 12

Event: Official 24 hour hacking kickoff

Let the Hacking begin! Ongoing talks, food, music, games, raffle prizes and fun throughout the day/night in central base camp area. “How to” breakout sessions will take place throughout the day/night!

Location: CoC 102 (room with tables) from 1PM on; add CoC 101 (social room) from 4PM on.
Time: 1PM Friday – 1PM Saturday
Schedule:
3 pm : How to Hosting / Joyent + PHP
5 pm : How to Javascript / YUI3
7 pm : How to Webservice / YQL
9 pm : How to Auth / OAuth
11 pm : How to App Platform / Open Social + YAP
1 am : How to Demo (and you show your stuff)
3 am : How to Juggle
5 am : How to Glow-In-The-Dark Frolf
6 am : How to Calesthetic
8 am – 12 pm : How to finish your hack (No talks)
Ongoing: Wii Rock Band, games, snacks, hacking
Food: Lunch, Dinner, Snacks (throughout), Breakfast, Lunch; including Pizza (Mellow Mushroom?), Quizno’s, Wingnuts…Sublime doughnuts, Einstein’s bagels
Giveaways: Hack U final T-shirts, Y! swag; Ongoing talks, Food, Music, Games, raffle prizes and Hacking throughout the day/night in central base camp area

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Saturday, March 13

Event: Hack Demos, Judging and Awards

Time to show off your Hack for a chance to win Netbooks, Ipods, Headphones, Thinkgeek.com gift certificates and of course, the grand prize trip to the Open Hack Showdown in California.

Time: 1PM
Food: Lunch – Moe’s
Schedule:
Food 1PM-1:30
Presentations 1:30-4
Food: Lunch
Categories:
Hack for Good
Metro (Front page Apps)
Best Mobile
User Experience & Design
Hardware Hack
Student Organization Hack
Best Overall (1st, 2nd & 3rd)
Giveaways: Prizes

Hi again (for the last time),

A couple people have asked me for the minutes/notes from last night’s meeting since they weren’t able to make it, so I thought I’d go ahead and share them with everyone.

The most important point is that Roger Pincombe and Neiloy Mukerjee are the new co-coordinators (or whatever titles they select) of the program. Roger and Neiloy will probably reachable at topics@gtacm.org soon. Expect all future emails to come from them.

The major points below are the items as they appeared on the agenda, and the minor points are what we discussed and decided.

• Class Format and Scheduling
  • 1 class per week
  • 1 or 1.5 hours per class
  • Up to 5 weeks at most
  • Might avoid scheduling 6-7:30 PM on Tuesdays because of CS mentor meeting
  • Might avoid scheduling Wednesdays for fraternity meetings
  • Friday starting around 4PM, Saturday around 12PM-2PM, and Sunday evenings were agreed upon as the best times for this semester. (Things may change in the Fall due to football gamedays)
• Topic: Intro to PHP
  • Our first class will be an introduction to PHP, a very popular web programming language, taught by Blair Daly.
  • Blair is a former CS teaching assistant and has created multiple successful online communities.
  • This class will take place later this month or early Februrary
• Do you know anything that you’d like to teach?
  • Ajai knows a few people that he thinks would like to teach topics on Ruby (possibly on Rails) development, as well as a person that already teaches “How to not be a Social Media Douchebag” somewhere else
  • A couple of gaming strategy classes were mentioned as fun breaks from standard classes
    • Discussed limiting sillier classes to just a couple per semester
• Is there anything you’d like to learn that isn’t already in our scope of recruiting?
  • Not really. In previous meetings, surveys, and polls, it looks like we’ve gathered pretty much all the popular ideas.
• Patrick is graduating and moving away, so the program needs a new coordinator
  • Roger Pincombe and Neiloy Mukerjee both stepped up and decided that they might be most effective working together to spearhead the program. From here on out, all TechTopics information will most likely come from them, and all questions should be directed to them.
• We probably need a website, even if just a simple one, to manage registration and scheduling.
  • Ajai volunteered to do this. He plans to do it by adding some functionality to the current GTACM wordpress installation (gtacm.org)

Soon, we should have a mailing list ready for anyone that is interested in our TechTopics program.

We did not discuss this as in-depth, but we plan to have Kristin Marsicano, instructor in the College of Computing, teach a topic on Android Development soon as well. Hopefully, we’ll get it going as an immediate second class.

Anyway, that ends my time at Tech, and I hope you guys get this off to a great start this semester.

–
Patrick Eisenmann
Former TechTopics Coordinator
GT Association for Computing Machinery
gtacm.org

Hi Everyone,

I’m Patrick Eisenmann from the GT Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery. If you’ve expressed interest in teaching or taking classes in our TechTopics program (which we had been calling Options Classes/Saturday Classes/SIGoptions), then you’ll be excited to hear we”re having a meeting today Tuesday, January 12th in (Edit: CoC 52) at 6PM. (Location may change, but we’ll email and post a sign if it does)

In case you’ve forgotten, TechTopics is a series of lectures taught by students, faculty, or external companies on a variety of topics that most students won’t get in regular classes. This includes languages like PHP, Perl, Ruby, Objective-C, and Javascript; frameworks like jQuery, YUI, GWT, and Rails; and mobile apps for all smart phone platforms. There is, of course, room for many more topics, I’m just listing what’s been popular in discussions

The purpose of the meeting will be to:

1. Finalize the format of the classes / Get your input
2. Discuss the first class that we’ve already planned (Topic: Intro to PHP)
3. Encourage anyone who might want to teach to follow through and plan a class
4. Select a new leader of the TechTopics program, since I’ve graduated
5. Eat our food

I hope to see everyone there!

–
Patrick Eisenmann
TechTopics Coordinator
GT Association for Computing Machinery
gtacm.org

Officer elections: if you’re a curent officer or paying member, you get to judge who will help run and grow GTACM in the future! Only paid members and officers can vote, but ***anyone can run for a position***, even if you haven’t been involved with us before. It’s not especially formal- you’ll have to tell a little bit about yourself and why you’re interested in the position.

This will be tonight (11/23) at 7pm in Klaus 1447.

We’re going to list the available officer positions and describe their responsibilities. You’ll have a chance to ask questions and know what you’re getting into! Then we’ll go through the positions and elect people.

We won’t have food. Sorry! And we do understand that Lockheed Martin is having an event at the same time, so we plan on having this event again either later this semester or at the beginning of the next one if you didn’t get a chance to come this time.

Our first members meeting this semester is going to be Thursday 11/19 @ 7pm and is open to everyone! Members meetings are to showcase all of the teams and projects in our organization and to promote our available leadership positions with a variety of roles and time commitments. If you’re interested in getting involved in any way, stop by!

Many of our officers will be graduating soon, so there are some great opportunities to get really involved! If you’re interested in developing your leadership abilities and other important skills, or if you come to our events and enjoy them, please take some time on Thursday to learn about how you can help, especially if you enjoy running social events. Pizza will be served!

Palantir will be presenting information about their company and then performing some technical demos on Wednesday, 11/18 @ 6:30pm in Klaus 1116. Free Wingnuts!
Here’s some more details:

Speaker: Ari Gesher, Senior Software Engineer at Palantir Technologies.

Ari will discuss how Palantir Technologies is revolutionizing the analysis of hard and important problems that face our world today, as well as showing off a live demo of Palantir’s software.

Palantir Technologies is working to radically change how groups analyze information. Founded in 2004 by a handful of PayPal alumni and Stanford computer scientists, Palantir Technologies has doubled in size every year while retaining early-stage values: a startup culture, strong work ethic, and rigorous hiring standards. Palantir currently offer two products: Palantir Government and Palantir Finance. Both are platforms for integrating, visualizing, and analyzing the world’s information. They support many kinds of data including structured, unstructured, relational, temporal, and geospatial. Their products are built for real analysis with a focus on security, scalability, ease of use, and collaboration.

Some of the GT GameFest Fall 2009 photos are now uploaded to our flickr group. Enjoy!

On Thursday, 11/12 at 6:15 pm in Klaus 2456, Tim Carr, (Software Manager, Homeland Defense at Northrop Grumman) will be giving a talk about “Agile Systems Development”. Pasta will be served!

Speaker profile

Mr. Timothy Carr has been working in the software engineering field for over 16 years. During this time he has gained extensive experience in all phases of the software development lifecycle in various roles and industries within both the public and private sectors. He has experience leading projects implementing object-oriented technologies (C++ and Java) in real-time embedded systems and business applications, following waterfall and iterative development models. He is currently serving as a software engineering manager within Northrop Grumman’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosive weapons (CBRNE) business area supporting multiple projects.

Presentation description

It is difficult to work in the software engineering field these days and not hear about Agile software development methodologies. More and more companies are recognizing the value of implementing Agile principles and moving away from the more traditional “heavyweight” waterfall models. This presentation will introduce Agile principles, terminology, process flows, roles, activities, and artifacts. In addition, I will share my personal experiences using both methodologies.

We will have pasta for 50 people. ACM members and officers get priority.

GT GameFest, a semesterly LAN party and gaming tournament, was held this past weekend in the Klaus Advanced Computing Building. The event was sponsored and operated by the Georgia Tech Association for Computing Machinery (GTACM) and SIGgame in coordination with the Residence Hall Association (RHA) and Student Government Association (SGA). Attendance for this semester’s GameFest ballooned to over 500 attendees, including over 250 tournament participants.

The most popular tournament was Team Fortress 2, with 10 six-person teams participating. Other tournaments included Call of Duty 4 – Modern Warfare, Counter-Strike Source, DotA Allstars and Starcraft: Brood War on PC; Halo 3 on Xbox 360; and Super Smash Brothers Brawl on Wii. Over $1,500 in prizes, funded by tournament fees, were awarded to the tournament winners. Four hundred burritos, 80 pizzas and over 1,500 sodas, energy drinks and bottles of water fueled the event.

SIGgame is a special interest group organized under the GTACM umbrella that is focused on all things related to games and gaming. SIGgame founded GT GameFest and has a successful Starcraft team that competes in organized intercollegiate competitions. SIGgame is also working on a game to be submitted to the 2010 Independent Games Festival (IGF).