Sophi Kravitz: State Of The IO

At the Hackaday SuperConference in November, Sophi Kravitz had the chance to look back on the past year of Hackaday.io, and what a great year it has been. Hackaday.io now has over 178k members who have published 12.6k projects with about 10% of those being collaborative team projects. But the numbers tell just a small story of the vibrant community Hackaday has.

The Hackaday crew made a trip to the desert to begin 2016. This resulted in the Hackaday Prize video which launched the engineering initiative which wrapped up with the awards ceremony at SuperCon. The video launched the 2016 Hackaday Prize, but not long after there were 80 different locations around the world that got together at the same time for World Create Day. Many of these meetups resulted in entries that joined the 550 projects submitted during the first challenge round of the contest. Of course the final number totaled more than 1000 projects!

world-create-day-world-map
Over 80 Locations for Hackaday World Create Day

The Hackaday Community grew its live meetups this year. The Hackaday MakeIt NYC meetup is a monthly gathering founded in 2016. The Hackaday LA meetup continues to flourish, with meetings now held at the freshly opened Supplyframe Design Lab every month.

The social interactions on Hackaday.io continue to grow. The Hacker Channel is the place to start. Interact with your fellow hackers any time you want, and join in the organized Hack Chats like this Friday’s Eagle chat. The Jobs Board is just one year old now and is a great place to find or advertise jobs. And there’s been a ton of community interaction around special projects like the Traveling Hacker Box.

 

Perhaps one of the most interesting surprises in 2016 was the Square-inch Project. This is a completely community organized contest started by [alpha_ninja]. But like any good idea on Hackaday.io, it didn’t take long to find help with the wildly-popular contest. The challenge was to lay out a meaningful circuit using one-square-inch of PCB. There were nearly 80 entries!

There’s more where that came from. You can try you hand coming up with an algorithmically generated default avatar for users. And an impromptu challenge popped up to give away some ever-elusive SuperCon tickets which itself spawned a second challenge.

The fun and camaraderie of creation continues today with contests like the 1kB Challenge. If you’re not on the IO, you’re missing out!

 

17 thoughts on “Sophi Kravitz: State Of The IO

    1. That’s *exactly* what I came here to say! There’s 12k projects and I can’t seem to find anything relevant to what I search for… And when I open a project the interface is pretty appalling.

      Then again, there’s a TON of dead projects (50%?) that will never get past the “initial idea” stage. I think there should be a way to delete, or at least filter those because it just reduces the signal to noise ratio by a great deal.

      Sometimes I sort of wish the place was more open, or more of community. Like being able to contribute articles (without getting paid!), or maybe someone who knows whatever CMS the site runs on top of could help make IO better.

      1. To all of you three above: what kind of hacker is that?

        If you don’t like the interface: just hack your own! Hack the CSS. Block this or that Javascript snippet (or even better: modify them in passing through your proxy!). Shut out this or that site providing javascript or counter pixels by –ohmigod! this is SYSTEMZ HAXXORZ!– modifying your /etc/hosts. But by all means: hack something, instead of complaining about layout. Seriously.

        (Me? I actually appreciate Hackaday’s fairly minimal approach, which interacts fairly well with my heavily gutted web browser. When somet
        Kids, these days.

        (Yes, a bit tongue-in-cheek. Do not take totally personally. Just a bit).

        1. Sorry, but trying to fix a ship made from iron grid using carbon steel sheets (CSS) is just too cumbersome :P

          Hackday.io looks like a wordpress with some glued on “extras”. It behaves like a blog, not like a project site.

          Please let this ship sink and create a new watertight one.

      2. 50% would be a pretty good quote, but it’s not a curated site and the project owners are responsible for the state of the projects. If they would decide to delete my projects that aren’t active I would scrap my stuff with their API and would be gone. But I don’t. Cause they don’t.

        There are pages you can use to write articles and they improved them over time. https://hackaday.io/pages/3459 – shameless self plug. There’s also the hacker channel that Sophie mentioned in the video, that’s probably the most active place to go.

    1. That is a feature, not a bug. Most cases anyway.
      There are several spammers and IO is actively trying to fix the issue. Right now it is 404 the pages that are attempting to sell ‘something’, I don’t recall what keeps showing up.

      1. Hmm, no. After deleting the offending part of the address ( it usually chokes in “%”, or “/”, “-“, etc ) , and using only the projetct number ( hackaday.io/project/number ) it goes to the right project.

        It is more of a lack of verification when the project is created and the name of it is appended to its number/code. Depending of the way it is written, the resulting URL turns to be incorrect.

  1. Was IO designed for the phone people? because its THE worst interface for sharing technical information I have ever seen. Even dumping something in random files on github is better.

Leave a Reply to davedarkoCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.