Category: Hack Day

So we hit our initial limits for people to invite to the Hack Day a little while back but a few people have dropped out and we’re feeling adventurous, so we’ve decided to open up another fifty places. So if you’ve been thinking how much you wished you were coming, but were convinced that you wouldn’t be able to get in, now you’ve got a second chance.

And to tempt you along a little more, Matt McAlister has posted a few of the companies that are coming along as ‘sponsors’ (really they’re organisations who wanted to contribute in some way and be a part of the day). So we’ve got people from Second Life, Arduino, Nabaztag, IBM DeveloperWorks, Make Magazine, Moo and O’Reilly coming along. And just glancing through some of the attendees, it looks like we have people coming along from Nokia, OpenStreetMap and all kinds of other places.

To sign up go to the Eventwax registration page and fill in your details. But do it quickly as spaces are disappearing. Also tell your friends!

I’ve just posted a really long piece over on the Hack Day blog about the various people from Yahoo and the BBC who are going to be coming to Alexandra Palace in a little over two weeks. Sorting out the speakers has been really surprisingly easy and good fun because everyone’s been so keen to come over and play. Nearly everyone I’ve wanted to come is coming, and will be around not just for their talk on the Saturday morning but for the whole weekend.

Some names and projects really stand out for me. Jonathan Trevor‘s going to be talking about Yahoo! Pipes which is a project that emerged out of the TechDev party of Yahoo that until recently I was working for. I remember Pasha Sadri mentioning this idea he had when Simon and I first joined the place, and it’s been really gratifying to see it come to fruition. Jonathan, who is coming over to speak, has been heavily involved in the whole project from really early on, and did an enormous amount of work on the incredibly stylish engine for manipulating feeds. Having him come over is really cool.

I’m also really excited to have Tristan Ferne and Chris Bowley from BBC Audio & Music Interactive coming. Tristan runs the my old R&D team at the BBC. We overlapped for a while, and one of the results of that time was the Annotatable Audio project which has now become Find Listen Label. He’s going to be talking about ‘Things to make and do’ at those places where media and technology collide. Very excited about that. Looking forward to seeing what they’ve been up to.

Another session that I’m personally really thrilled about is Aaron Straup Cope and Dan Catt—both of whom work with Cal Henderson at Flickr—doing a session on Machine tags. I don’t know that Machine tags have really got the press they deserve, and I was particularly excited to get them coming to talk about them because they’re (as far as I know) totally non-proprietary. It’s really just a concept that Flickr have pushed further than most other organisations. I’m particularly fascinated by it because it’s all about taking the machine-readability of tags and extending it massively, with lightweight and community-generated schemata allowing any object to have an almost infinitely extensible pseudo-database of information attached to it. I’m not explaining it very well. If you want to know more, you should read up on Flickr’s implementation of Machine tags.

Speaking of old-friend and fellow (ex) UK Blogger Cal Henderson, he’s coming to Hack Day as well. He’ll be doing his barn-raising rendition of ‘Why Flickr’s Web Services Rule’ (or something suitably kitten filled). So that can’t help but be awesome. I’m hoping for a few rousing games of Faceball too.

Er. Who else have we got? Obviously backstage.bbc.co.uk‘s main culprits Matt Cashmore and Ian Forrester are going to be performing. We’ve got Christian Heilmann and Nate Koechley talking about YUI, Kent Brewster doing a Yahoo/BBC mash-up in an hour and Bradley Wright talking about Yahoo! Answers APIs. And if that’s not enough for you, if you’re into Geo stuff we’ve got Mirek Grymuza talking about Yahoo! Maps APIs and Mor Naaman from Yahoo! Research Berkeley, who are responsible for such projects as Zonetag and TagMaps.

Oh! Which reminds me. There’s a project that Paul Hammond and Simon Willison and I started working on late last year with Mor and the YRB crew that I’m also hoping we’ll be able to show off at the event. I’m not yet clear on whether we’ll be doing a session on that yet. I guess I’ll see how the next couple of weeks goes.

There’s more news to come about some of the other people coming to the event, but some of that’s in the air at the moment. Hopefully we’ll have more to talk about on Monday or Tuesday next week. Keep watching the Hack Day blog and backstage.bbc.co.uk in the meantime…

Since Yahoo and the BBC announced a couple of weeks ago that they were doing a Hack Day in London’s Alexandra Palace, I’ve had a lot of people contacting me with questions and comments. Of all the questions, the most common one by far tends to go something like, “Hey there, I’m really excited by the Hack Day thing, but I’m not sure I’m the right kind of person for the event. Should I come?”

The truth of the matter is that the event in Sunnyvale was really exciting because there were a whole lot of people working in really different areas, and I’m really hoping the same thing happens in the UK. Personally I’m hoping that alongside people working with the web and widgets and desktop software that we get a fair few students and creatives working (or looking to find someone to work with) in the cutting edge of real-world product, hardware design or even fashion design. I think the day has the potential to be a real creative melting pot.

That may sound a bit weird, but let’s have another look at some of the projects that were made at the US event. In fact let’s look at the group who won the day. Known as Black Box Nation, they were a group of three women working with sewing machines, soldering irons, nokia 6682s, pedometers, Flickr and the Zonetag API. They collectively put together a handbag that took a picture with a camphone every few steps and used Zonetag to upload it to Flickr and turn it into a life-recording weblog. It even geotagged the photos as it went. You can see the Flickr stream of the handbag to this day and there’s a site about it the whole project at Blogging in Motion. Does that kind of thing interest you? Do you want to get together a project about future fashion with built in computrons? Then Hack Day really could be a great place to do it, with access to a whole range of people who’d be able to give you information about some of the technology side.

Another project that did really well at the event was called the YBox, a piece of hardware that called itself Konfabulator for your TV. This project was a whole bunch of technology inside a sweet tin that you attached to your television. Once you’d done this, it gave you access to simple plain-text useful information pulled off the internets by computer magic. This kind of project could be a really good match for the UK Hack Day. If you’re interested in this territory, I can reveal that we’ll definitely have at least one speaker who’s very knowledgeable about building and developing around set-top boxes and interactive television.

And this is just the start. The other projects ranged from the sublimley useful to the ridiculously fun. Cal Henderson knocked up a digest-maker. You could go to a web page, type in a word and get back a digest of information about that subject that would automatically print itself out of a nearby printer. That one used Flickr, del.icio.us and Wikipedia. Another guy called Mo Kwaken made something called Blabber which unfortunately I can’t find any more information about online. It was supposed to be able to use absolutely any face from Flickr but in the end just used Patrick Stewart. You drew a line where the mouth was and then whenever you talked into a microphone, his mouth would open like Canadians on South Park. So you could pretend to be Patrick Stewart, which was fun.

There was an awesome Upcoming hack called gutentag which added a different social layer to the service, and an awesome flickr-based project called The Color Field Camera which would identify the colour of the thing it was pointed at, access Flickr and source pictures that matched that colour using the Flickr Colr Pickr. That was pretty extraordinary. Here’s a picture below:

Basically the day was tremendously creative, and hopefullyif you’ve read some of this postyou’ll realise that you don’t actually need to be working in Python to be able to come along. If you’ve got a great idea that you can’t build along, then first off I’d recommend trying to find a team of people to work with you. Ask your technologist friends or come up with an idea you could build together. If you do have a team, make sure you let us know though when you sign up, so we can make sure that you all get to come along. Or if you’re a designer and you want to come along to help out other people, and are prepared to get involved in their hacks – that’s good too. If you know people who build and create things in different and unexpected territories, then let them know about the day. This really is a day where you can show off your creativity.

I’m hoping that we’ll get a whole bunch of people coming who are interested in building mash-ups or new sites and services. I’m hoping that people will come along and build the features that they’ve always wished their favourite sites had, using all the gear and technology that Yahoo and the BBC have available. But I’m also definitely hoping that we’ll get groups along from people interested in weird interactive art projects like the ones that Regine Debatty talks about at We Make Money Not Art or some of the really awesome people who make stuff at the RCA’s Interaction design course. I’m hoping that people interested in Everyware and the kinds of physical stuff that Schulze & Webb and ThingM put together will also think about coming.

If any of this is exciting to you, then sign-up now and spread the word around. You can also read more about what people are saying over on the YDN Hack day blog. Andas usualif you have any questions, please feel free to ask me in the comments here or directly at tom {at} the name of this website.

Right then. This is going to be quite a big deal so pay attention! A few months ago you’ll remember Yahoo! put together a Hack Day on their campus in Sunnyvale and invited several hundred designers, developers and engineers to come and crash the place. People camped in the grounds overnight, had access to a whole range of speakers and technical experts from Yahoo!, Flickr and Upcoming, and used the time to build a whole range of bloody fascinating things including a handbag that posted pictures to Flickr and a ybox. You’ll also remember the live entertainment, the piles of pizza, the donuts in the morning, the bleary-eyed pioneers and the heady stench of unwashed technologists on the Saturday evening.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I think we can do better than that. So it is with great pleasure that I’m going to direct you all to hackday.org and encourage you to sign up for the first Hack Day to be held in Europe. And this time it’s not only a Yahoo! event, because it’s a partnership with BBC Backstage. And it’s not at a campus, it’s at London’s bloody Alexandra Palace! On June 16th and 17th! Bring a kite!

Everything else remains the same. It’s a two day event, starting first thing on Saturday morning and running through to Sunday evening. We’ll have a whole bunch of speakers from Flickr, Yahoo! and the BBC to start us off. We’ll have food—mostly flat—to meet the specialised needs of our guests. There may be booze. I’m not telling. If you want, you can stay awake all night or crash out in a corner in a sleeping bag. The only requirement or restriction (except for the legal ones, which you should probably read) is that you come to the event and try and build something, ideally using some of the stuff that the organisations hosting the event have to offer. Did I mention it was free?

You can build robots if you’d like, or things involving televisions or tagging or photos or smart dust. There will be prizes for the best stuff made. And judges! And probably a limited number of free Flickr badges! And yes, there will probably be a band. And no, it probably won’t be Beck.

Even with space for hundreds of creative h4X0rs, an event this awesome will get oversubscribed, so I’m afraid not everyone who applies will get a ticket. And in order to makes sure that the people who actually make things get to come, I think there’s going to be a process where we weed out obsessive business networkers. So be patient once you’ve appliedwe’ll let you know as soon as we can if you’re invited or not. If you want to improve your chances, stick a couple of links to stuff you’ve made into the ‘Special Requirements’ field of the sign-up form. People who build get priority.

Anyway, that’s your lot. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this event and how great it is to be a small part of the incredible group of people from both organisations who are helping to make it a reality. I think it’s going to be really awesome and I’ve wanted to talk about it for a long time. Hope to see you there! Sign-up now!

Yesterday, many of the engineering teams around Yahoo! Europe got together for EU Hack Day, and Simon and I collaborated on a little fun something around Flickr and ritual humiliation which we were quite proud of, and here’s the consequence:

The whole thing was highly entertaining, a little bit Eurovision and we’re all looking forward to the next one, but I have to be honest – this post is really just about showing off the glass trophy and pointing out to Cal that his little cups are really a little bit lame. So sad.