Farm Hack Day blog

Hack Day was great fun and people were working on all sorts of different things.

The Coding Dojo group made an adventure game in Inform 7 with additional hackery to integrate in a swipe card reader and drink temperature sensor. Jez has blogged about it.

Jamie Campbell made an on-line image compositor.

Tristan Roddis from Cogapp made a Facebook picture defacer, hopefully he’ll comment to say who helped him with the Flash.

Giles and Matt from Magpie worked on a Firefox extension.

Tom Morris hacked various social services for friends and friends of friends lists.

I (Paul Silver) and David Rosam made an app to send jokes through Twitter, with extra help from Alex Farran and Dave Stone on making it automated.

Stamati Crook was working on a social networking app for schools, with help from Stuart Conway.

Julian Blundell was working on a PHP based secure login system he’ll be open sourcing soon.

And I’m sure I’ve forgotten what several people were working on. Please comment with what you were working on, and if you’ve got more details to add to my snippets…

Thanks for coming to Hack Day and making it a great event!

It was a very enjoyable day with some great hacks created, more about that later. For now I just have a reminder of the tags, and a final thank you to the sponsors.

Tags, please use: farmhackday, hackdaybrighton, digitalfestival, hackday

Thanks again to Cogapp, Magpie, and TalkWebSolutions for making the day possible, and to everyone who came for making it fun.

We need plenty of things to build at Hack Day, so we need ideas of what people want and would find useful. Please comment and share your ideas.

I’ll kick off with a couple:

1. A Twitter app which will send me a joke every hour or two. (This is what I’ll be building tomorrow.)

2. A small app which would let me post events to Upcoming which repeat, i.e. I want to put in the Farm meeting advert and set it to repeat every Wednesday until the end of January, and this app would work out the dates and send the events to Upcoming rather than me setting each one up.

Please comment with your own!

Please bring with you:

• A laptop if you will be coding (rather than just helping others)
• Yourself

And that’s it. Well, clothing would be good too. Lunch is being provided, as is electricity and wifi.

If you have large files to download, please do it before you come as the wifi is spread around a lot of people and a large download could slow it down for everyone else.

10am – Registration

Come and get your name badge, stickers, and start meeting people.

10.30am – Quick introductions

A quick introduction to the day, and everyone says what they’ll be working on, e.g. “My name’s Paul Silver and I’m going to build a Twitter app to send out jokes, and I need some help to find lots of short jokes to send out.” Or “I’m Joe and I want to install WordPress, but I’m completely lost and please can someone help me!”

We have stickers to show your skills, and what you need, so you can ‘tag’ yourself and get some help easily.

11ish – Hacking (includes Lunch!)

Get together with someone you want to help or sit down and start working on your own code, in a friendly environment with lots of people around to ask for help, or to help out when they’re stuck.

Lunch is provided and we’ve got a cafe area if you don’t want to get your laptop all sticky.

4.30ish – Look at what’s been done

People present what they’ve got done (if they want to.) Hopefully we’ll have some cool things to show off, and if not, some hilarious messes. Don’t worry if you don’t want to show what you’ve been doing, we’re not going to force you into presenting!

5.50pm – Clean up & departure / off to the pub

A quick clean up to help Brighthelm prepare for packing up, and then off to the pub if you’d like to continue the day.

Thanks to the good people at TalkWebSolutions, we now have stickers for Hack Day, letting us ‘tag’ ourselves with skills and the skills of people we need help from.

TalkWebSolutions is a web design & development agency here in Brighton, and run by Nick Tong, a ColdFusion specialist and all round nice chap.

Thanks also to Moo who gave us a discount on the stickers for the event.

You can now register for Hack Day:

http://farmhackday.eventwax.com/farm-hack-day

Once you’ve registered, you may want to mark yourself attending on our Upcoming page, which’ll help people spot who else they know that’s coming.

Tickets for Hack Day will open at 1.30pm on Monday 5th November, at this address:

http://farmhackday.eventwax.com/farm-hack-day

There are limited tickets because of the size of the venue, so please sign up early if you want to come.

Another big thank you, this time to Magpie for becoming our food sponsor. When you’re chowing down at lunch time or on a snack at Hack Day, these are the people you’ve got to thank.

Magpie have a very sweet looking app called Brandwatch, which helps track your brand on the web. They blog about what they’re doing here.

Thanks to Simon Bloom of Bloomindesign for creating the icons and logo for Hack Day. You’ll be seeing his work on everyone’s chests on the day as they’ll be stickers to help us organise ourselves.

Simon’s a long time member of the Farm and designed the current version of our site back in 2004. We’ve all come along way since then.