Hacks on how to organize office lunch orders, write novels on Github

By Dennis Clemente

NEW YORK–Last April 29, Uncubed held its meetup, “Hacks that saved my life” at Refinery 29 with the World Trade Center building gleaming behind it as early evening set in.

Hacks That Saved My Life

Tuesday, Apr 28, 2015, 6:00 PM

Refinery29
225 Broadway, 23rd Floor New York, NY

13 Uncubed Went

*** Please note: You MUST register through aolpresents.uncubed.com to attend. RSVPs through Meetup alone will not be valid. ***Welcome to the Edge Live series, presented by Uncubed & Aol.VERSION 1.0: HACKS THAT SAVED MY LIFE”One day Jobs came into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, an engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and com…

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This is not your typical show-and-tell meetup. It might as well be classified the hacked-and-tell meetup as each presenter talked about how a new app or site made their life easier, more fun and even useful in an unusual way.

Just ask Travis Kaufman, a senior platforms engineer at Refinery 29, who improved lunch ordering among his colleagues at Refinery 29.

It should be easy to order lunch, right? Well, there’s always room for improvement if you ask Kaufman. If you are ordering for five people, you should be okay using email. But when it goes up to a hundred or 200, the number of employees at Refinery 29, how would you deal with it?

Kaufman used some open-source software – NoeJS, ExpressJS, AngularJS, Redis and Twitter Boostrap to create an app he called R29 Lunch Box. The app allows people who ordered lunch for delivery to subscribe to lunch alerts.

Next hack came from Gregory Mazurek of Gilt who showed us how he uses Github to write novels—yes, you heart it right. It does make sense if you’re looking at collaborating with people on your novel. Talk about everybody on the same page.

I used majority of it using Github. Largely intended for engineering purposes, I use it for managing versions of (my novel),” he said.

How would you like weather forecasts? Do you like it served via email or text message with some type of meme around it, even suggesting what you need to wear. Funded by Beta Works, Poncho is free and customizable.

We also learned some new hacks from Zach Feldman of New York Code Design Academy. He dared us to have an impact on a product without being a non-product person.

Feldman showed us how he tweaked Amazon Echo to put his voice reminders/meetings on his Google Calendar? He showed how his voice turned to text on Google Calendar.

For him, Amazon Echo is a voice learning platform that you can modify to the functionality you want.

“It understands me,” Feldman said nonchalantly.

His hack on Amazon Echo is interesting the way he says “stop” to prompt the end of each instruction, much like how telegrams were voiced to a messenger.

Last presenter was Moat which showed its measurement analytics for ad industry and ad agencies. Using Coke ads as examples, the site showed how it can measure people’s interaction with all of the brand’s recent ads—how people see it and when they click on an advertisement.

Dennis Clemente

Shuttling between New York and other US cities, Dennis writes about tech meetups when he's not too busy working as a Web Developer/Producer + UX Writer and Digital Marketer.

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