London Hackday 2007
I decided to attend the first London Hackday last weekend. I actually didn’t know what to expect, but in the end it was a lot of fun. This article covers the event, the hacks created and my own progress on a little project I have been working on for a while.
The Hackday Concept
The idea of a London Hackday was taken from the Open Hack Day held at the Yahoo! offices in California in 2006. The basic concept is much like a BarCamp, where developers are invited to stay and camp at the premises for a 2 day experience. Where BarCamp focuses on presentations, Hackday is a concept that tends to lean towards “hacking stuff together” using the organizers API’s.
In 2006, the organizer was Yahoo!, but in London we also had the BBC as an organizer. The BBC has a backstage department that focuses on making their data (schedules, history, casts, etc) available to developers under a “do-no-evil/non-commercial”-license. The existence of this department should be a great example to other (read: Dutch) broadcasters.
A Lightning Experience
When I arrived at the venue (Alexandra Palace) I decided to hang out with the regulars like Dan W., Thomas Scott, and Guy West. After defeating Tom in a game of Halo2 on the big screen we were in for a surprise as we heard a bang the size of a bomb. The roof vents opened soon after this and everyone was surprised. What happened? We got struck by lightning!
Unfortunately, the roof vents had opened and couldn’t be closed for a while as no-one seemed to know how. And with thunder comes rain, so we all had to leave the hall before being washed away by rain. We spent a couple of hours in a smaller area of the building before we could move back, but the rest of the day was filled with jokes about the lightning strike. Later on I found out that Alexandra Palace wasn’t hit by lightning since 1920, and last weekend we were hit twice!
Hacking Away
Once we claimed the main area back, we started hacking away. Originally half the first day was filled with presentations about various Yahoo and BBC API’s but I kind of missed these in the lightning debacle. Strangely I also missed what FireEagle was (can anyone tell me?).
I started off a bit slow, discussing ideas with Dan and Tom while the WiFi remained extremely unstable. The WiFi has become very unstable since the lightning strike, but somehow it took 15 people of BT and Cisco running around to get it fixed. Somehow this didn’t prove to me that these are skilled companies. After a couple of hours the WiFi was finally up and running and we could start making our hacks for real. (Un)fortunately this was right about the time that someone managed to get a copy of the episode of Doctor Who of that evening, which we then all went to watch on the big screen. I must say that Doctor Who works pretty well on the big screen!
Tom decided to do something funny: A mixed reality game where you had to tag people with a post-it note and than take a photograph of it and post that to Flickr. I managed to tag 3 people and ended up 3rd in the competition (where is my bronze platter?!). Dan went off to create something involving LastFM on his mobile phone, but I don’t think he eventually ended up with what he wanted.
Personally I decided to continue my development of eeGoo. The concept of eeGoo is something I have been discussing with a couple of people lately including Alper, and it kind of reflects Alper’s last post of claiming back your identity. I started off on version 0.1 a while back, but after working my way through the Ruby on Rails handbook I decided to start over again during Hackday.
The idea behind eeGoo (link will come soon) is simple: to create a page that aggregates who you are. This includes aggregating blog posts from your blogs, photos from Flickr, vCards/hCards from the web, and maybe more. Additionally, I thought of making the whole page microformat and OpenID enabled (allowing you to login with OpenID and also use the page as OpenID redirect). Unfortunately I didn’t get that far with the project as I had some serious problems with the Flickr gem for Ruby and I had to write my own little Flickr API handlers.
In the end I didn’t get to show my product as it wasn’t that evolved yet, and I actually played too much Werewolf with guys like Simon Willison and Tom Morris to be able to concentrate again at 2AM, so I went to sleep. Lucky for us many of the other hackers did produce some interesting stuff. I will highlight some of the ones that stuck with me:
Showing Off
Late Sunday afternoon it was time for the showoff. I think the buzz-words for the afternoon was Twitter as many of them had to try and do some Twitter integration. It got me thinking that having Twitter integration has gone from being a cool thing to a sort of must have feature that isn’t that impressive anymore.
Simon Willison
Simon Willison had a lot of fun with his hack, showing off how Google had used “Google Smite” to hit Hackday with a lightning strike. His second hack was a bit more useful as he made a simple website that aggregates all London Geek related information (blog posts, events, etc). It can be found at LondonGeeks.net and I think it is extremely useful.
BBC Nwsr 24
A more useful hack, and therefore probably winner of the BBC hack award, was the website BBC Nwsr which is a mash-up between the BBC video stream, Flickr, BBC front page, Yahoo maps, etc. The idea is that they augment the normal BBC video feed of the news with images of the topic that is discussed, show the location of the topic on a map, fetch keywords from the audio, and get some relevant headlines from the BBC website. It just works and looks brilliant and I think it deserved the award.
Hackfight!
Even before the event, Jeremy Keith had started gathering a bunch of enthusiastic people (including Colin Schleuter) around him before the event. His idea was to create a web platform that would allow you to battle against others using your online presence. Much like my eeGoo project he planned to use all your lifestreams and social networks to battle against your peers. Although a fun game, the presentation was a bit chaotic (only 90seconds) and Jeremy realized that that might have been the reason for the lack of understanding of the concept. On his blog he explains a bit more of the idea behind Hackfight!
Shiftd
One of the coolest hacks was presented by The New York Times Research & Development Team, who showed how you can use a phone with RFID and a simple webservice to seamlessly integrate and sync your mobile life with your online life. Very, very cool. It got a lot of “oohs” and “aahs” from the audience, but it is a bit hard to explain. Their website uses screenshots and photos to make it very clear so I advise you to have a look there.
iWondr
The concept behind iWondr is simple: use several API’s through Twitter to enable you to ask information while you are on the road. Questions ranged from “I wonder what the train times are from Manchester to London?” to “I wonder whats on in London”. I still have to give it a try but it sounds handy. It is funny to see how all these Twitter based “hacks” are doing what big companies have been trying for ages through expensive sms constructions.
Conclusion
In the end I was happy (and tired) to have gone to Hackday. It is just amazing how many people from around the world come to London to show what they can do in a very social (not really competitive) manner. I applaud Yahoo and BBC for understanding that creating a social relationship like this with your developers is a requirement these days. I wonder when we can go to the next Hackday at Google or Microsoft? For now I leave you with some final links from other people that I have enjoyed.
Interesting Links
Hackday London >> BBC Backstage Blog
