Last week, I was part of the BarCamp London Hackathon. It had all the usual ups and downs of a Hackathon - laptops crashing, APIs failing, and HDMI ports breaking. We had a massive projector for participants to show off their work. The HDMI connection was… shit. Sorry, there's no better way to put it. It worked for about 30 seconds and then displayed a green screen. We replaced the HDMI cable. We swapped between a dozen dongles. We tried Linux, Mac, and Windows. In a last ditch attempt at g…
Continue reading →
Last week, I attended BrumPropHack - a hackathon in Birmingham which looked at problems with retrofitting homes to make them more energy efficient. There were some great talks about the scale of the problem - both in terms of the number of properties which need improving and the cost of retrofitting. A bunch of teams showed off some impressive demos which aimed to tackle the issues. My demo was reasonably simple and (I thought) quite effective. It displayed a satellite view of a street in…
Continue reading →
I go to lots of hack days and hackathons. Some are big corporate affairs, some are boutique community events. They all have one thing in common - Geeks suck at giving demos. You have 3 minutes to convince the judges - or your peers - that you've built something brilliant. How do you do that? One Hundred and Eighty Seconds. It is not a lot of time. So here are my top 3 tips for succeeding at a demo. Show the thing This is the most important one. You need to show what you built. Demonstrate…
Continue reading →
It has been about 6 months since I started my new job at NHSX - I've loved getting stuck in to the Health Service culture. But there was one thing I was missing... a decent hack day! I was delighted to get a ticket to NHS Hack Day. This is a quick post about the event, and what I learned. What's the point of a hackday? There were three common reactions from people when I said a bunch of geeks were going to an NHS Hack. Ah! But the real problem is [some incredibly complicated thing] -…
Continue reading →
This is a sort of poker variant / group solitaire which can be played either competitively or collaboratively. These rules were thrashed out at the Oxford January Games Jam. I think it is original - but there are literally thousands of card games, so it is hard to tell! As I've mentioned before, I love collaborative games. I'd much rather help my friends than beat them. This game is deliberately designed to be simple. I get confused with some card games where everyone has a different role,…
Continue reading →
I'm a little obsessed with collaborative games. I'm bored with fighting against my friends, trying to bankrupt them, or simply beating them into submission. I attended the Oxford Games Jam with one very specific aim in mind - help create a game where people had to work together as a team. It's a hard mindset to get into - almost all games are competitive. But with the help of an amazing team, and the frank feedback of several play-testers, I think we created something fun and original(ish). …
Continue reading →
Occasionally, I get some really interesting freelance gigs. It turns out there's a rising market for conference hack-days. New company Digiotology paid me - and several others - to participate in a hackathon based at the Extreme Medicine Conference in London. Conference goers could attend lectures, visit exhibitor stands, and come discuss their needs with a group of friendly hackers. We were somewhere between a curiosity ("what are hackers doing here?!?!?") and a magic circle ("Could you…
Continue reading →
On Saturday, I attended the Shakespearean HackFest organised by HiCor / TORCH at Oxford University. I'd like to discuss the hack our team created and how the event differed (in a positive way) from other hack days I've been to. The Event On arrival at the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, I was automatically assigned to a team. I think this is a great model for hackdays. To often, I find, anti-social nerds struggle to form teams - or they team up with people they came with - or non-hackers…
Continue reading →
So Google Ventures is swinging in to London Town, dragging one hundred meeeeeellion dollars with it. Wow! What a way to reinvigorate the European tech scene. All that cash is sure to filter its way down into the economy. Viva la trickle-down economics! Or, not so much. Earlier last week, I was asked if I would mentor teams in a start-up hackathon - partly backed by Google. That, in itself, is nothing too unusual. I'm often asked by start-ups, early stage companies, and big business to…
Continue reading →
This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. I've just come back from an amazing BlueLightCamp 2014 - held in the splendid offices of the Ordnance Survey. Themed unconferences are nothing new - but I think this was one of the first that I've been to focussed on such a vital topic - the Emergency Services. You can read a full write up of all the sessions on the official blog, or you can read Ben Proctor's take on the day. Here are my scattered thoughts, …
Continue reading →
Rewired State have just announced "End Of The World Hack" We know the earth is about to be bombarded with solar flares and magnetic storms of varying ferocity on July 4th, 5th and 6th 2014, by which time the infrastructure of the energy and communications networks will have been completely decimated across the entire planet. You have 48 hours to best prepare the human race for survival, through the chaos, and on to a successful future. After which time there will be no electricity and no…
Continue reading →
What a crazy weekend! I made the last minute decision to attend Rewired State's "National Hack The Government 2014" hackathon. Rather than hack on any of the provided datasets, I wanted to work on an interesting way to present all the security flaws I had found in Government websites. I teamed up with Mark, Marcello, and Orlando - together we created "Corkr - Plugging the Government's Digital Holes" We were looking for different and interesting ways to visualise the data. Interactive…
Continue reading →
