One week to Hack Day

Well Hack Day London is now less than a week away and things are really starting to hot up - quite literally as I’m currently working in an office with no air con, in the attic of an old town house on the hottest day of the year so far - but that’s not the point.

The point is I’ve been boring my work mates with talk of Hack Day for weeks and as I got an e-mail from Matthew Cashmore explaining what’s happening when, what I’ll be doing and when I’ll be doing it today - I’ve got worse than ever.

So I thought, for my own safety (I saw one of the people on my desk unit holding a large stapler) I decided to blog the excitement instead.

Not only will there be lots of pizza (I don’t drink alcohol but apparently they will be lots of that as well if that’s what you’re into) and 24 hours (overnight) of hack-heaven BUT there will also be some amazing speakers on a range of topics AND a top band on Sunday evening AS WELL AS the chance to meet some of the coolest people in tech right now.

Aaron Straup Cope, Bradley Wright, Cal Henderson, Chad Dickerson, Chris Bowley, Christian Heilmann, Dan Theurer, Dan Catt, George Wright, Ian Forrester, Jonathan Trevor, Kent Brewster, Matt Cashmore, Mirek Grymuza, Mor Naaman, Nate Koechley, Ryan Kennedy, Tom Coates and Tristan Ferne.

I can’t hear you saying right now ‘Who are all those people and what are they talking about?’ but I’ll tell you anyway - well I’ll tell you how to find out.

Go to the Hack Day London Back Network speaker page.

The weekend will see sessions on building a BBC News Search App, the Cutting Edge of Interactive TV, Yahoo APIs: BBC Auth and Yahoo Mail (assume Yahoo has the ! even though I haven’t typed it - it would have been easier to type it than explain why I haven’t but hey ho!) as well as Building with BBC APIs and more.

And more isn’t a session by the way - but Machine Tags is and so is Things to Make and Do, Flickr APIs and Yahoo Pipes.

I love the idea of the three main areas for sessions are ‘Main Stage’, ‘Bean Bags’ and ‘Sofas’ - Obviously the first thing I did was look at whether the sessions I like the idea of the most are on the Sofas - not a fan of bean bags and main stage usually means plastic chairs.

If I only go for the Sofas I will hear The Cutting Edge of Interactive TV, Machine Tags, Things to Make and Do and Using Yahoo Pipes - all things that look really good.

So assuming I’m not going to be needed too much in my role as (let me just look it up) Tech Leader then I will base my session choices on 1) being with the sofas and 2) not being already full.

Being a Tech Leader seems a little complicated to me but Matthew Cashmore has more faith in me and my abilities than I obviously do - here is a quick extract of our e-mail conversation earlier:

ME: Tech  Leader or Steward? Steward?

Matthew: You’re gonna be a tech leader

ME:  Fair enough - I didn’t want to say it myself - after all I am British - can’t be doing with all that self promotion nonsense

Obviously reading that back while posting it to a blog that’s pretty much all about me and my opinions does seem a little um… wrong… but … hey ho!

Anyway - if you’re going to Hack Day then ‘See you there’ and if you go and I don’t see you then tag your posts, photos and anything else (if it’s physical take some parcel tape and brown paper) with hackdaylondon.

If you want to tags stuff on Flickr using machine tags then the correct term is upcoming:event=173371.

Thanks Tom Coates.

Sphere: Related Content

Share This