Hack Day

I didn’t get to write a summary of Hack Day.. Fell into a week of busyness and a bunch of real work to get out of the way before Glastonbury. But that’s another story.

Hack Day was good fun:

• Lots of interesting people
• Lots of encouragement
• Great inclement weather and systems problems to make us work together
• Lots of great ideas flowing around. One of the things I love about the hacker crowd is the willingness of pretty much everybody to put forward crazy, mad schemes to test all the boundaries in sight. And how delightful to have somebody to listen to my mad schemes as well.

With a couple of annoyances for me:

• The WiFi never quite got reliable, at least on the Saturday. Very frustrating, and pretty quickly made me attempt to do something that didn’t need a net connection.
• I had an offer of a comfortable bed and good food close by, so that made it easy to sneak off on Sat and get a good night’s sleep. (Not really an annoyance, but the temptation got to me and i didn’t stay up hacking all night :-)

I got a good way through making a python APML library at Hack Day. I had intended to use it to do some attention-based searches on BBC content, but that will have to wait for later. I’ll put the finishing touches on that and post the code in the next couple of weeks after a bit more testing.