I don't watch much TV. During the last episode of The Apprentice, my Twitter-feed was suddenly flooded with people talking about Nick Holzherr's app "Whisk". Apparently it was some kind of recipe / shopping / mash up thing called Whisk. Sounded good. Sounded familiar. Then I remembered this from CadburyHack Cadbury UK@CadburyUKBest use of APIs at #CadburyHack - Whisk team for their recipes mashup pic.x.com/e9ztkuy3❤️ 0💬 0🔁 017:23 - Sun 27 May 2012 Now, I didn't see either the TV show or the…
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I had a great time at the Homeless Hackday. This is a belated write up, because I wanted to let a few thoughts peculate. The Problem There has been a worrying rise in the number of people rough sleeping - especially in the capital. There are a number of charities and Government departments which are available to help people who are homeless. They wanted a smartphone app / mobile web site which would help tackle homelessness. Either by helping people people directly or by allowing members …
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Another brilliant event from Over The Air. The perfect mix of lectures, hacking, and relaxing in a country manor / museum. And, to top it off, my hack won a brace of prizes! The Wifi just about held up. Although I think it's fundamentally impossible to provide decent connectivity to 200+ people. Especially when they're geeks. Dan Benton@dogsbodyorgIt's people like @edent that break conference Wi-Fi ;-) #ota12 pic.x.com/dl2fibfi❤️ 0💬 0♻️ 015:43 - Fri 01 June 2012 Which, in turn, lead to …
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Before Cadbury's inaugural hackday began there were a number of rumblings on the blogs about the extact nature of Cadbury's intentions. See Thayer Prime's and Emma Mulqueeny's thoughts on the subject. As it happens, after a bit of gentle poking, some of the terms were clarified. The event itself went rather well, but I'd like to point out a few points where it didn't quite live up to the Hack Day Manifesto. Registration - due to some confusion with the registration form, some entrants were …
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Dave Winer is totally off base when he says "Hackathons are how marketing guys wish software were made." Perhaps it's different in his part of the world, but over here, hackdays are fun! All the hackathon / hackdays I've been to are, essentially, Scrapheap Challenge* for software people. *Note to Americans, Junkyard Wars is the US remake of Scrapheap Challenge. The last hackday I went to was about people learning, playing, relaxing, building, tinkering, bodging, faking, and innovating. All…
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The lovely people from UK Gov Camp have put up some of the videos from the barcamp. Here's me chatting about mobile and the WordPress Mobile Pack. https://vimeo.com/36553562 From Steph at Helpful Technology. See my blog post about the day. …
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As per the meme, here are my 20 points on Gov Camp UK. Sign up early. I dawdled and so was only able to get a ticket for Saturday. I feel like I missed out on a lot of interesting conversations. BarCamps should be recorded for posterity. It's a point I've made before. Cameras and disk space are so cheap, we should record what we say and do at BarCamps by default. Now, that may inhibit some of the conversations and reduce the "Chatham House" aspect - but individuals can decide whether or …
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