Hacks Projects, products, or anything else powered by code

Namesies - Because Naming is Hard
Coming up with a good name for your projects can be pretty hard. It is even harder to come up with a name with an available domain and Twitter account.

Tony Dewan whipped up a handy Ruby script that, given the name you want, will check if the domain, Twitter account, and US Trademark is available.

Zero Inbox - Distraction Free Email
Local iOS whiz Josh Brown has released a simple app that solves a problem: sending an email requires you to see the unread messages in your inbox. Sometimes you just need to fire off an email and not deal with the 814 unread items looming in your inbox. Josh realized it was sometimes taking him 30 total minutes just to send a 2 minute email because he would get sucked into reading and responding to other messages. But no longer!

Check it Zero Inbox in the App Store!

t and timetrack, two tools to track time
After to-do lists and blog engines, I think every programmer's favorite project to write is a time tracker.

With his new project - concisely named t - Matt Burke wanted to focus on a CLI tracker to help record how much you've worked on just one thing.

Jason Butz took a different approach with his app timetrack. Jason wrote a very simple one-user web app to track your work hours that you can deploy to Heroku in minutes.

Happenings Special events or new meetups

Indianapolis Python Workshop
In the same vein as this summer's RailsBridge workshops, there will be a free, hands-on introduction to programming with Python on September 27-28. The event is geared for beginners and is targeted to women of all ages and backgrounds (and their friends!). You can sign up here. Props to the IndyPy group for organizing this event!

Open Source Comes To Campus: Bloomington
If you are a student looking to get involved with open source (coding, testing, documentation, design, graphics) you should checkout this event put on by OpenHatch and the IU CS Club. It's a full day event taking place on Saturday, September 21 at IU Bloomington. You will learn about open source licences, tools, and communities in the morning and start making your first contributions in the afternoon. Space is limited so sign up here (this event is primarily for IU students, but there may be some spots available for the general public).

TEDx Indianapolis
The second annual independently organized TED event in Indianapolis is happening on Tuesday, October 22. The theme for this year is "Mix It Up". Tickets are still available but going fast.

From the Blogs Sampling of technical posts, both new and old

The 4-Player Raspberry Pi Arcade Cabinet
Kyle Shipley details how he built a retro arcade cabinet that is powered by a Raspberry Pi

The Un-Interview
Chris Vannoy shares his take on the technical interviewing process

The Trouble with Time Zones
Larry Price recounts how a small bug can snowball into a Big Deal

(PS. Alex Conner built an RSS aggregator for Indy Hackers! Woo hoo! All the info is on GitHub, including directions for getting your blog added)

Last Word In which Miles and Matt toot their horns and hock their wares

Matt has been blogging a ton this summer. Matt's favorite thing he wrote was "Do things, write about it". Read it - and then go do something and write about it!

Miles recently finished a big redesign of the IndyHackers website - it's yellow-orange and sexy now! P.S. The site is open source so if you find any issues, you know what to do ;-)

The Hacks && Happenings newsletter is a monthly round-up of interesting projects, special events, and other newsworthy tidbits about the software development community in central Indiana. Tell your friends!

Did we miss something cool? Do you want more of X or less of Y? Just want someone to yell at? Email us at newsletter@indyhackers.org anytime.

Thanks for reading and stay awesome Indy!

Your friends,
MilesZS and Matt Swanson