Open Hack Day
Posted by Neil Crosby on June 16, 2007 09:47 AM
Well, I’m off to Yahoo! London’s (and The BBC’s) first Open Hack Day. I’m writing this on the tube, rain’s streaming down outside, and I couldn’t be happier.
Inspired by last year’s Open Hack Day in the states, this year’s is taking place in The BBC’s Alexandra Palace, a marvelous old building in the north east of London. As a Yahoo myself, I can’t go up for any of the prizes on offer, but that means I can concentrate on helping out anyone who needs it with the Yahoo APIs. Which will be fun. I’m staying overnight, and I’m expecting a raft of games of Werewolf to occur, and a lot of fun to be had all round.
As part of my preparations for hack day, I’ve been doing a lot with TheTenWordReview.com - I’ve got 200 moo cards printed to hand out with 25 different fantastic reviews on them, I’ve got a t-shirt printed to wear today which reads “I write reviews in exactly ten words, ask me how”, but perhaps most importantly I’ve released a first version of a public API for the site. I go into more detail in my post over at TheTenWordReview.com, but basically it allows you to pull out lists of reviews in a whole bunch of ways in either JSON, serialised PHP or RSS format. Pretty groovy.
Just as groovy is the fact that lovely lovely Steve Webster has promised that he will take that API and run together a flash badge that anyone will be able to put on their own site. Hopefully this will help to get the site spread about the world a little bit more, which can only be a good thing.
My train’s pulling into my station now, so I guess this would be a good place to stop for now. See you all at Hack Day!