I was lucky enough to be at The Guardian’s first ever hack day last Thursday and Friday. I had promised myself that I’d blog from the event but then ended up taking on that most foolish of commitments; a hack that would be used by all participants and also one which another hack relied upon for data. 

It was a really great 2 days, stimulating talk and a scary amount of brain power in the room. There was a real buzz to the event and when I finally left at 10pm Simon Willison was still hard at work on his very cool crowdsourcing app to match electoral constituencies to a map. There were some wonderful hacks, including things like Tom Armitage’s LED swingometer and a really beautiful attention data and Guardian content mashup from Glenn Jones from Madgex. 

My hack was an SMS voting system for everyone to decide the “People’s Choice Award” it was a shame not to be hacking at Guardian data but I’ll hopefully be playing with that quite a lot anyway. It gave us a chance to have an XFactor style phone vote with people texting in a 2 digit code for the hack of choice. 

Just for fun I had it send a return text message thanking for voting (with a custom sender ID) and then also had it posting out the votes to the lovely physical hackday winner Swingometer hack from Mark.

All went to plan, the hack worked and the swingometer swung. The winners of the people’s choice built a beautiful GreaseMonkey script to allow you to easily create Guardian keyword combinations… there’s a screencast of it going up, any minute now.

Thanks to Paul Carvill for documenting so well. 

I so enjoyed the event. There was a real chatter and tap of fingers on keyboards throughout the whole 24 hours of the events and the quality of the 37 hacks is a real testament to the very talented team at The Guardian. Really looking forward to hacking on The Guardian data more, now that I know the wonders hiding within their full fat RSS feeds!