Cardiff Hack Day - For the Social Good
Last Sunday I was invited by Box UK to be one of the judges at a Hack Day they were sponsoring in Cardiff. Jumped at the chance as a bit of a fan of these. Free pizza in no way played a part in this.
I was there representing Cardiff University - as I'm currently the Applications Development Manager there (essentially looking after the team of devs who do web / mobile application work). Fellow judges were Jenni from Bath Uni and Carey from Box UK, and organised by Lisa and Emma.
It was full of stars too - Dan Green of BigLittleCity fame took photos (all the good ones here are from him, except the photo of chocolate eclairs, for some reason). If you need photos, he's proper good like - http://dangreenphotography.com/. And not just him - we also had Gavin "lived on mini eggs for a year" Davies pop in to help out.
So, What's a Hack Day Then?
In case Hack Day means nothing to you, or brings images of a) bad films about computer hackers or b) particuarly bad smokers - it's neither of those. Well maybe a bit of the first. And maybe a bit of the second with Carey.
It's when a group of people - developers, designers, sometimes related professions like journalists, get together for a day or two and come up with interesting applications or uses of data. Normally in teams, and often with some (token) prizes.
The theme for this one was "for the social good".
The venue was Cardiff Students' Union. Quite handy really. Now I've not been to a non-music event there - it was surprisingly well suited to a hack day. Tables, a dozen sofas, wifi (loving Eduroam by the way - free wifi for staff at any higher ed place in Europe!), sound system, big screen. Not too much sunlight... Ideal.
Carey with the old ^H joke. Always a winner!
There were a mix of people and teams - some students, some experienced freelancers, some from web companies.
NoteSlide
A team of first year Cardiff students - Geriant, Henry & Joseph, along with famous IgniteCardiff presenter Warren, created a student pin board application called NoteSlide. It let student post events, news or items for sale to a virtual noticeboard. They could then be browsed by categories or location (browser based geolocation tagged items).
Students (other team member off camera in sailor outfit)
Warren got automatic points for doing all his development in Vi. And think the guys got a crash course in Git into the bargain (version control, no comment on Warren).
The app was MongoDB / PHP based, with geolocation and some nice attention paid to the user interface. Quite clever to do a student related app too, considering two of the judges work at universities!
Actual codes. It's just like that film, Swordfish.
Up the Revolution, Comrades
Occupy Where was from some of the Uni of Glamorgan guys - Mark & Kevin, plus Bristollian-who-loves-Cardiff Sean.
This was a Ruby app that won the most things to mashup awards (not a real award). You enter a placename and it finds your nearest Occupy camp. Shows a map location, related tweets (where would hack days be without twitter?), google news items and location data.
Occupy Where. Cardiff, that's where.
You can see Occupy Where at http://occupywhere.herokuapp.com/ - plus the source code on Github.
Winter is Coming
The "Grit.ly" team were Martin, Matt & Mark - PhD students from Cardiff. The app they created was a Django based backend with a primarily Google Maps frontend. Inspired by #uksnow, it took things a bit further. It aimed to help find dangerous ice related blackspots - with a nice mix of live data and historic data. Historic information of accidents is pulled from government stats, mixed in with geolocated twitter tweets using the #ukfreeze hashtag.
The red bull fuelled Game of Thrones Grit.ly team.
There were some particularly nice touches to the UI in this one. And it tackled the social good theme very well.
Grit.ly in action (to save you ending in, er, traction)
You can see the app at http://gritly.nomovingparts.net/ (you may want to look at Cardiff to see some test tweets too).
Pêl-droed on An-droid (sorry)
Next up were a couple of apps - a welsh football mobile app and a social drawing game. Both impressive individual efforts. The football app from Tomasz was done using Phonegap. This was something particularly interesting as the university has looked at this as an option for making hybrid native/web apps before. Sure that supporting the Welsh Premier League could be classed as a form of charity, so just about comes under the social good heading. Though was sad to learn Inter Cardiff no longer exist. Then we had a collaborative drawing game from Robin. This was nice - a canvas based drawing UI with a Node.js (user group imminent) backend.
We probably should have given a prize for developing on an 11" MacBook Air
Hack Translate
Hack translate was from some of the Box UK guys. It was a clever interface to pull up tweets from Twitter and let you automatically translate them. They had some challenges - naturally the first API you think of is Google's. Turns out Google Translate API v2 charges now though. So, remarkably, it was Microsoft to the rescue (never thought would type that). Bing translate came in to save the day. You could select a tweet in your timeline and translate it, posting it to another account if needed.
Cunning linguists
This was a really nice app. Translation is always an interesting area - especially in Wales, as so many of our services need to be bi-lingual. Automatic translation is tricky - but this had potential.
Explore Gary Barlow
Craig, Paul and Tom created Explore Cardiff (despite at least 50% of questions appearing to be about Gary Barlow). This let users created geo-located quiz questions about sites in Cardiff. It used the FourSquare API to identify interesting places, then users could answer questions or add new ones.
The most impressive setup of the day
It was ambitious - with Paul "PiPi" Preece creating the JQuery Mobile phone app, Craig "Codes" Marvelley (now a fixture on the PHP international speaking circuit) creating a Symfony based admin system, and Tom working with Cappucino (framework, not the coffee) then Prototype. Code for the Symfony part is up.
Rare sensible question
Everyone's a Winner
It's not really about the prizes. But there were some winners.
- Best app - Grit.ly. This was a nice tight scope, met the brief well, the guys worked well as a team, had a nice UI and design and integrated multiple data sources. And it had a name missing vowels, always a key feature.
- Second place - Noteslide. This was impressive, especially considering the bulk of the team were first year students. Again, effort had gone into the UI as well as the backend and it addressed a specific need. Quite clever as two of the judges were from universities too.
- Individual award - Tom from Exploring Cardiff. Being paired up with two of the best devs I know, Paul & Craig, is tricky - but he held his own with a Cappuccino based UI for their app. And frankly anyone who sits next to Paul for 12 hours deserves some sort of award.
There were quite a few interesting things to take away from it. Was surprised by the spread of tech - we had PHP, Ruby, Django, JavaScript, JQuery, Symfony, MongoDB, Phonegap, Cappuccino, Node.js, Canvas. No Java, .Net or native apps. Hackdays all about the scripting languages.
Also interesting was two teams used Twitter's Bootstrap, while another used Zurb's Foundation. The CSS frameworks are gaining some traction, especially for quick prototyping. Bootstrap is something we've been looking at using at the university.
Several of the teams also used Github - even for a one day project.
From the sounds of it all the entrants got something from it. It's always handy to mix up between students, graduates and professional developers. Tend to pick up new or different ideas. And though I'm always supposed to be the responsible one talking about requirements, testing and documentation, sometimes it's nice to work without them...
Also, #eclairs.
Related Links
- Craig's post - http://marvelley.com/2011/11/24/for-the-social-good-box-uk-hackday-1-recap/
- Mark's post - http://whitehandkerchief.co.uk/blog/?p=53
