Farm Hack Day blog

Hack Day was great fun and people were working on all sorts of different things.

The Coding Dojo group made an adventure game in Inform 7 with additional hackery to integrate in a swipe card reader and drink temperature sensor. Jez has blogged about it.

Jamie Campbell made an on-line image compositor.

Tristan Roddis from Cogapp made a Facebook picture defacer, hopefully he’ll comment to say who helped him with the Flash.

Giles and Matt from Magpie worked on a Firefox extension.

Tom Morris hacked various social services for friends and friends of friends lists.

I (Paul Silver) and David Rosam made an app to send jokes through Twitter, with extra help from Alex Farran and Dave Stone on making it automated.

Stamati Crook was working on a social networking app for schools, with help from Stuart Conway.

Julian Blundell was working on a PHP based secure login system he’ll be open sourcing soon.

And I’m sure I’ve forgotten what several people were working on. Please comment with what you were working on, and if you’ve got more details to add to my snippets…

Please bring with you:

• A laptop if you will be coding (rather than just helping others)
• Yourself

And that’s it. Well, clothing would be good too. Lunch is being provided, as is electricity and wifi.

If you have large files to download, please do it before you come as the wifi is spread around a lot of people and a large download could slow it down for everyone else.

10am – Registration

Come and get your name badge, stickers, and start meeting people.

10.30am – Quick introductions

A quick introduction to the day, and everyone says what they’ll be working on, e.g. “My name’s Paul Silver and I’m going to build a Twitter app to send out jokes, and I need some help to find lots of short jokes to send out.” Or “I’m Joe and I want to install WordPress, but I’m completely lost and please can someone help me!”

We have stickers to show your skills, and what you need, so you can ‘tag’ yourself and get some help easily.

11ish – Hacking (includes Lunch!)

Get together with someone you want to help or sit down and start working on your own code, in a friendly environment with lots of people around to ask for help, or to help out when they’re stuck.

Lunch is provided and we’ve got a cafe area if you don’t want to get your laptop all sticky.

4.30ish – Look at what’s been done

People present what they’ve got done (if they want to.) Hopefully we’ll have some cool things to show off, and if not, some hilarious messes. Don’t worry if you don’t want to show what you’ve been doing, we’re not going to force you into presenting!

5.50pm – Clean up & departure / off to the pub

A quick clean up to help Brighthelm prepare for packing up, and then off to the pub if you’d like to continue the day.

You can now register for Hack Day:

http://farmhackday.eventwax.com/farm-hack-day

Once you’ve registered, you may want to mark yourself attending on our Upcoming page, which’ll help people spot who else they know that’s coming.

Tickets for Hack Day will open at 1.30pm on Monday 5th November, at this address:

http://farmhackday.eventwax.com/farm-hack-day

There are limited tickets because of the size of the venue, so please sign up early if you want to come.

Joh Hunt is bringing the Brighton Coding Dojo to Hack Day. The Dojo lets people experiment with coding in a friendly, non-competitive environment and has some cracking programmers take part, so we’re very interested to see what they come up with after a day’s hacking.

A ‘Hack Day’ is a gathering of developers, designers and general techie-types where people make new things, for instance new websites, apps, widgets or thingumees (OK, I made up that last one.) It’s basically a chance to get together, make something cool, show off techniques, and have some fun.

The Brighton Hack Day is being organised by Paul Silver and other members of Brighton Farm, a freelancers networking group. It’s part of the Digital Festival happening in Brighton across November.

It’s a free event, supported by sponsors. It’s happening at the Brighthelm Centre on Saturday 17th November. There are limited spaces (80) and we’ll be opening ticketing in a week or two, keep watching this blog for an announcement on that, or mail paul@paulsilver.co.uk and I’ll make sure you’re given a heads up.