UW-Madison Hacker Within meeting this Friday

[Paul Wilson]

Hello UW-Madison Hackers Within,

(and those others out in the world since I am still using the old list to make sure no-one is missed)

Based on the discussion over a week ago, we'll have our first UW-Madison Hacker Within meeting this Friday, Jan 30, from 12-1 PM.  I have secured room 2188 in the Mechanical Engineering building, hoping it will have space for all of you who are planning to attend.

There is one very important topic that we did not successfully address at our reboot meeting: We need to identify some student leadership!!!  For reasons that will become clear in the next paragraph, this will not succeed unless some of you are willing to take on a number of simple tasks, for example:

• manage the mailing list
• identify and reserve rooms
• communicate with future presenters
• offer to present a topic of your choosing

It could be a different person for each of these!!!

The topic for this first meeting was to be an overview of Jekyll, the tool that Github uses to automatically process and format web pages.  It was my plan to give the talk based on my own shallow experience.  Alas, we have hit upon the first flaw of our reboot.... I have a meeting scheduled for 12-1 that I cannot miss, leaving us with 2 options:

1. one of you can learn a little about Jekyll & gh-pages and share it with the others
2. we can have another topic

I am personally a fan of the first option because:

• The basic UW Hacker Within pages are already setup (https://github.com/thehackerwithin/wisconsin)  You can view it at: http://thehackerwithin.github.io/wisconsin/
  
• There is a great example of where to go next in the Berkeley Hacker Within pages (https://github.com/thehackerwithin/berkeley/tree/gh-pages) [Note: their default branch is not gh-pages so be sure to check that branch]  You can view the product at: http://thehackerwithin.github.io/berkeley/
  
• This would demonstrate the true spirit of THW: you don't have to be an "both-hands-tied-behind-your-back" expert on a topic to present on that topic.  You just have to know more than one other person!
• You only have to learn how to add a single post  - or modify the "Welcome to Jekyll" post that is there
• The internet is full of great tutorials and resources to learn more how to do that.
• You can practice your git/github skills (or learn some new ones)
  

Please let me know if you want to volunteer!

Paul

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Paul Wilson ~ UW-Madison ~ 608-263-0807 ~ cal: http://bit.ly/pphw-cal
Professor, Engineering Physics. ~ http://cnerg.engr.wisc.edu
Faculty Director, Advanced Computing Infrastructure ~ http://aci.wisc.edu