hackNY Fellows Workshop: Fluid Dynamics and Gmail Productivity

In this post, 2011 hackNY Fellow Aaron Marks describes the lastest student workshop, in which Fellows teach each other tips, tricks and skills they know and are learning through their internships. This past week a group of the 2011 hackNY fellows gathered for the fourth hackNY workshop, a series of events organized by the Fellows to teach each other skills, technical or otherwise, which they are qualified to give short talks on. This week’s workshop saw Fellow Grant Kot give an introduction to the world of HTML5 animation. Using the Javascript library Gee.js, Grant got the fellows up and running in minutes, animating basic spinning circles and Pacman-like figures with HTML5’s Canvas support. Fellows were quick to play around with and hack the basic commands Grant introduced, producing interesting animations to everyone’s delight.Following Grant’s presentation, Aaron Marks (your humble author) gave a talk on a less technical matter: Email productivity hacks. Specifically, instruction was given on how to be a Gmail power user, taking advantage of keyboard navigation, email address hacking, and filters. Hopefully the fellows will combine both skills from the workshop and use their newly freed up time to code some neat animated HTML5 websites using canvas!