Wow, I am still tired a few days after the event. It was intense and stressful at times but a very rewarding experience.

The atmosphere was amazing and the spirit of the developers really shined through after the
act of god. Yahoo and the BBC were brilliant hosts and the location was spot on.

I can only fault the weekend on two things; I was not impressed with the food, there was no variety and not many healthy options and the wifi was patchy, going up and down like a yo-yo. It made development a challenge and because our idea was based around using web based feeds and APIs, with no internet we could do nothing at times. Not a great advert for BTOpenzone and CISCO.

It was clear that many of the developers that came to hackday do R&D a lot as part of their jobs or were experienced hackers. For me it is a very tiny bit of what I do day to day and most of the innovative thought I do is at home in my spare time. I certainly think that innovation and creative thought is an innate ability, but it certainly helps to practice it, as with any skill. It has really spurred me on to try and build hacking and prototyping into my weekly development routine.

It would be good to have more events like hackday in the Northwest. wink, wink, nudge, nudge Andrew or Dave

Tom Coates (one of the main event organisers) summed it up nicely in a blog post.

The project

Team puggle (our team name loosely named after a breed of dog ) hacked together iwondr. We basically created a communication layer between twitter and various feeds and APIs, this layer allowed querying of information from a tweet (a twitter message).

You could tweet “I wonder what is going on in Manchester tonight?”. The twitter bot would monitor your messages extracting key search terms then go off to the correct source, in this case upcoming.org, and try to find the information. It would then send a direct message to you if any information was found.

I do think the project was a good idea and we will be developing it further but I don’t think it could really be described as a ‘hack’, it was more substantial than that. James and Chris did a really good job of building the bulk of it and presenting at the end. Me and Russell tried to help as best we could!