On Saturday, I attended the 2012 New Times/TimesOpen Hack Day. It was a long day, but I had a lot of fun. I sat in on an intro session to Arduino which was pretty cool, and also a session on the EchoNest API, which I ended up using in my project. You can find out all about my project on the Readtrack project page.

It’s a bookmarklet-powered little app that analyzes the page you’re looking at (using the AlchemyAPI) and then tries to find related music (using the EchoNest API) which it then plays back to you in your browser (using rdio). I got a “runner up”/honorable mention prize 🙂

One of the most visually-polished projects was “Story Arc”, which showed a visual representation of the frequency of mentions of keywords over the NYT archives. Probably the most fun one was a set of drivers for a DDR pad, hooked up to commands for things like deploying code!