Where is Everybody?

Two weeks ago The Endless Hack arrived in the San Telmo barrio of Buenos Aires with a mission statement and not much else. Not only were they lacking any contacts within the city, they were also unsure of where to start with their hacking. They wandered Puerto Madero, wondering "Where are all the hackers?" and drunk liters of Patagonia cervesas to past the time and beat the heat.

Then, from NYC, came their first pull request of the trip: a tip from Gray Blue who suggested they journey over to Palermo and meet his old co-workers from the Fanbridge development team, including Jony and Gabriel. Our hackers immediately jumped in a 60 peso cab and headed that way. At the same time, Jo followed a tip on Twitter to several other local developers such as Davo and Dan, and the inaugural Endless Beer meetup was poured and swallowed at Antares in Palermo.

Lee and Johannes had finally found some hackers and an idea for their first hack.

The Endless Hack #001

Shouldn't finding people you know or should know in a specific town be easier? This is the kind of problem that would undoubtedly come up again on The Endless Hack, and our hackers built a simple solution to assist them in their journey. It's called Who the ****s in Town?

The app takes the people you follow on Twitter and make them searchable by city, state or country. You can even dive-in one level deeper and lookup the followings of your followings who are in town, in case you want to discover people in town that you don't already know.

This first hack was simple but it revealed a lot of issues with the lack of basic current location data being made available to developers on popular social networks. It required quite some heavy data moving and geocoding. At least Facebook made a step forward now with their Graph Search, which was ironically announced the moment we planned to release this.

The guys already found a few people to hang out with in Montevideo, Uruguay where they've arrived this week. Some improvements will come in if this app continues to be useful in their future travels.

Open-Source Travel

The Endless Hack is like a Github repository for travel. Friends and followers send our hackers pull requests on people to meet and places to go. Here's a few highlighted commits which Lee and Johannes merged into their stay in Buenos Aires.

Looking for the perfect place to work in BA led our hackers to several bars, cafes, and co-working spaces, including El Federal, Mama Racha, and Urban Station but the best place to merge code by far was El Ateneo. Renovated and converted from the 1919 theater Teatro Gran Splendid, El Ateneo's cinema seating was removed in exchange for book shelves but most of the ornate interior remains including still-intact theater boxes for reading.

Our hackers wouldn't have made it out of San Telmo if it wasn't for the local developer scene, so special thanks to Jony, Gabriel, Davos, Dan, and all others friended during their time there.

Want to help?

Want to work, have a beer, or do both with Lee and Johannes? Got a tip on where to go, who to meet, and what to do while they are on the road? Reply to this email or click the button below. You can also send the guys a tweet @TheEndlessHack