This weekend was Hackcamp London 2010. 80 or so geeks camped out in Google London’s canteen building stuff. We all came filled with ideas and had 24 hours to make them work.
The day kicked off with a range of presentations running us through various APIs that we might liked to have worked with. There were a wide range of different APIs demoed all giving us more ideas about what we could build.
Hack prizes were announced including a prize for the best sandwich hack.
This is only the second hackday I’ve been too and I am really not much of a coder but I still managed to arrive with way too many ideas of what to build. Most of my ideas had started with a small idea and by the time I arrived into London on Saturday morning had mutated into gigantic ideas that would have been too much to make in a weekend even if I knew how.
So I built a twitter sentiment analysis app. It’s not 100% accurate and is still a bit buggy but I learnt a lot doing it and don’t think it’s bad for 24 hours work. I plan on working on it more in future as at the moment it is not as sophisticated as it could be. But like I said we had 24 hours.
Ok, so I was going to write about Think Visibility and say how great the last one was and how much I am looking forward to the next one.
For those who don’t know in the words of the organiser:
“Think Visibility is a series of conferences on “the things that usually get left behind in the web design process“. The conferences feature well known speakers, new talent and great networking opportunities.
Think Visibility’s first outing, in March 2009, sold out within weeks. We discovered that there was an appetite for more of the same, covering a wider range of subjects.
So Think Visibility is back on 12 September 2009 – and this time, we’re bigger!”
Tickets are on sale now and if you want to get hold of one you should most definitely get your arse into gear before they sell out.
So I wanted to say more about Think Visibility but I got distracted. What could possibly distract me so much. hmm I am rather ashamed to say so instead i will ask a question. Why am I looking at a picture of your cat?
Yes, I know it’s not big and it’s not clever, but I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine and really that’s all I can muster up as an excuse.
So erm for you viewing (dis)pleasure… from why am I looking at a picture of your cat:
Last night I appear to have had a bit of an adventure.
It started off quite relaxed with an after work visit to Wetherspoons to sup pear cider while we waited for the others to arrive.
Yum
Which I got ID’d for.
WTF!
TheHodge and I were met by Sarah who successfully completed the finding people in a Wetherspoons needle in a haystack challenge.
Over the road to Mr Foley’s to accidently offend the bar staff by ordering a selection of cider and ignoring their fine selection of beers. But it was clearly a cider drinking kinda night.
Oops
I thought I had a clear memory of the rest of the night until I read Tim’s recount of the evening. It may not be how I remember things but it is certainly a very eloquent tale of ranking terror, yoghurt and some rather fetching hats.
Northern SEM is a monthly meeting that is loosely tied around the SEM industry. It’s in Mr Foley’s on the first Friday of the month. So if you are interested in search, geekey, and or beer get yourself out next month.
Why, it’s the monthly Northern Bloggers meetup of course!
Kicking off at 6pm in Old Broadcasting House and then heading to Mr Foleys.
TheHodge will be doing the presentation this month and telling us all about how he lost his blogging mojo. It promises to be a very interesting talk indeed.
