-->

I Have No Idea What I’ll Be Doing at Hackday London on June 16-17

A big heads up, and a little bit of head-scratching from me now. Tom Coates (if you look up “jolly nice chap” in the Oxford English Dictionary I’m sure you’d see his picture) let me know that I’ve been lucky enough to be invited to the upcoming Yahoo Hack-Day

The aim of the event is to hack/build stuff together. I’ve heard the phrase “a MacGyver Convention” and that’s probably the closest that a one-line pop-culture reference could get to the truth. There’ll be soldering irons and tech and lights going ping all around the halls of Alexandra Palace, along with a multitude of coders getting to grips with the Yahoo API’s (they’re co-organising the event) and whatever else they can dream up – and putting up to 500 hackers into a really big room with wi-fi and free pizza is going to create some sparks.

And you know what? I’m not really at any sort of public competency level. In terms of programming I can do enough to get websites going (and tweak the Wordpress plug-ins). The last serious language I did was OPL on Symbian, but it never managed to make the leap beyond Symbian OS 7.0 (it;’s on 9.1 now BTW), so that rules that out. It’s always been easier for me to outsource serious coding to people who know that stuff. As the day approaches, I’m feeling a bit of awe. Sure I can act as a lightning rod for ideas, but is that enough at an event like this?

I have had one slightly horrifying thought – and that is that with all the programmers, soldering irons, desks, gaffa tape and crackpot ideas… there doesn’t seem to be a bubbly and perky interviewer going around everyone finding out what’s going on, and doing a 3 minute – you know, like Phillipa Forrester on Robot Wars…

Philippa Forrester in the pits at Robot Wars

May 30, 2007; Daily Links, Hackday London;

Possibly Related posts:

If this is your first time here, why not consider subscribing to my RSS feed?

Comments

4 Responses to “I Have No Idea What I’ll Be Doing at Hackday London on June 16-17”

Tom Coates on May 30th, 2007 19:18

An absolutely terrifying idea, old chap. Terrifying.
Ewan on May 30th, 2007 19:32

Yes, I know. But if I don’t wear the corset would it be something useful to do? That’s the question…
Julian Burgess on May 31st, 2007 10:00

I’ve signed up for it too and likewise have no idea. I met two other people at minibar who are going. There was talk that it might well have a strong geeky hardware element.
Ryan Alexander on May 31st, 2007 11:44

I don’t know, that could be a good look on you, kind of goes with a Kilt, especially a leather utili-kilt