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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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Hack on some Elixir with me tomorrow if you're in New York

It might be short notice, but I'm going to be taking part in the Make A Diff Workathon tomorrow at Thoughtworks, and I recommend you join if you're free. Make A Diff is an organization I helped start this past month in order to help get us technical folks working together on tasks of political and civic engagement. We started it after our country elected an orange demagogue and some of us felt especially motivated to use our magical talents of hacking the mainframe for the better. This is not a politically partisan meetup, though, it's fundamentally about making a positive difference using our tech skills.

Tomorrow we will be helping to contribute to some rad open source projects. Details are in the link above. I am particularly excited to get my hands dirty with Elixir, which is a really interesting functional programming language I could see myself really enjoying.

There are three really interesting projects, including a Fake News Detector, but I am most excited by the idea of working on the Elixir/Phoenix API for Code Corps because it's been on my to-learn list for a while. Elixir seems like a very friendly and powerful language, and Phoenix seems like a well put-together framework that appeals to what I like about Ruby on Rails.

Tomorrow should be a good opportunity to get some good experience in collaboration, GitHub, and open source. You are welcome to stop by for the whole day, or part of the day. All experience levels are welcome. Please RSVP if you do intend to come. You also are welcome to come and contribute even if you have zero technical experience, there are a lot of ways to help. But if you are into the code part, I really think these projects have a lot of exciting features from a technical perspective, and it will be a really fun day. I hope to see you there.

Spread the word if you have any friends who might want to come.

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