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!
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