On April Fools Day 2017, something amazing happened.
A unique, one off event. Something truly incredible.
It was my 27th birthday.
Hmm? Oh yeah. It was the eighth Hacksoton too. Let’s talk about that.
Over a hundred people descended on Central Hall for our annual event, and it was a huge amount of fun. We had a great mix of attendees, from our biggest fans, to newcomers just wanting to see what it was all about. And for us, there’s no better feeling than when people turn up (for starters), and really engage with what we’re doing. It makes it all worthwhile. It was the perfect birthday gift for me.
Every year we see a tremendous amount of raw talent and learning going on at Hacksoton, and this year was no exception. Powered by bacon rolls and cake, our audience blew us away with their creativity and passion. If we keep this up, I’m going to run out of superlatives for these round-up blogs. We had fantastic giveaways courtesy of Hays Digital Tech, free drinks courtesy of Snowflake Software, and we kept the lights and WiFi on with help from Embecosm and Gitkraken. All in all, a great day!
So, like every year, here’s a run-down of some of the amazing things people did at Hacksoton. And because you’re all bored of my opinion by now, let’s sprinkle in some views from the other organisers and volunteers!
The Small Hall at Hacksoton is dedicated to young coders and makers, and I always love seeing what they’ve been up to in the arranged workshops and on their own. They didn’t disappoint! Tonnes of great stuff happened and we were privileged enough to see a small slice of some of it on stage during Show and Tell. Firstly we had Chloe and Judith’s Geodesic Dome, which glowed in the dark, making for a great visual. After that, a horde of young Minecraft fans created an awesome interactive puzzle, which was ably demoed for us by Daniel De Kock.
Not to be outdone, the teenagers, students and adults leapt into action to show off what they had been making. From the design side, Edoardo showed off a redesign of Wikipedia. Holly Saurus, owner of the best name in the universe (and yes, she IS a palaeontologist. I refuse to believe otherwise) showed off an evil bunny card, perfect for Easter. And the zany ideas didn’t stop there; we saw Aaron’s Cordova Pokedex, “The Fish People” made a fish dance to Gangnam Style (don’t ask), and team “Lys Fibe” made a sat-nav-style system which gives you “warmer” or “colder” instead of an actual route.
There were also lots of visual and webcam-based hacks this year, which is reflective of a growing interest in virtual and augmented reality. Sean Tracey’s incredible dinosaur vision augmented reality, complete with dinosaur onesie, blew everyone’s minds. Hikar is an augmented reality app for walkers made by Nick, and Olly, one of our younger attendees, impressed with a cool array of webcam effects based on mathematical functions.
“My favourite was Ollie’s webcam effects. It was really cool to see how different mathematical functions could be applied to the pixel values to give varying and sometimes psychedelic effects; I was very impressed how much the young coder got done in a hack day!” — Benjie, Hacksoton Organiser
Slack is a popular communication tool for teams, which we actually use for organising Hacksoton, and multiple teams took to adding functionality to Slack to help improve their everyday lives. Brandon demoed a bot designed for sending terrible drawings to your co-workers, while Joe and Kamila created a bot for taking breakfast orders, hoping to streamline the process by which they receive free bacon rolls every Friday. I work for the same company as them and I can tell you, everyone in the office is going to appreciate that.
“My favourite talk was Joe’s because it’ll help us get breakfast ASAP on a Friday” — Emma, Breakfast Fan (and Hacksoton volunteer).
We also had useful websites and apps! Mel showed off her SWOT analysis generator, “Team Whatever” demoed a videogame statistics site, Michael made an anagram API, the “Ninja Pirate Dinosaurs” made an application for taking notes at college, and Jem revolutionised crocheting by unveiling her pattern generator, which takes an image and turns it into a shape you can make with yarn.
“Jem’s crochet pattern designer was awesome!” — Dan, Hacksoton Organiser
To conclude what was possibly our biggest show and tell ever, we had Craig demonstrating some Internet of Things with Open NMS and Eclipse, and Charlie showing us his great radio website.
We streamed as much of it as we could, and you can see some of the footage here, here, here, here and here. It was an awesome day, and I hope, if you were there, you had as much fun as I did. And while I would love to take all the credit, the truth is that there’s a whole army of people that go into making Hacksoton work. This time more than ever, the team went above and beyond in ensuring we opened the doors on time and had food, chairs, tables, Skittles, extension leads and all the things an event like Hacksoton needs.
So please, if you’re inclined, go find these people and thank them for their help and contribution:
Venue: Central Hall
Sponsors: Hays Digital Tech, Snowflake Software, Embecosm, Gitkraken
Organising Companies: Etch, Moov2, Tech Age Kids
Organisers: Yours truly, Phil Dye, Elbrie De Kock, Dan Thomas, Benjie Gillam, Thomas Frame
Volunteers: James Bruton, Howard May, Tracy Gardner, Emma Budd, Shula Varney, Joe Glombek, Matt Jackson, Judith Jones, Brandon Hawkes, and a whole host of others who will be edited into this blog as soon as we’ve compiled the whole list!
Donators: Bladez Toys, Hinge’s Easter Egg Hunt, and several of our attendees who donated money at point of sale. Thank you!
“I want to give special mention to the endless stream of applause that was required for all the people we had to thank” — Phil, Hacksoton Organiser
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