Hackday afterthoughts.
social software, hackdaylondon, coding
So it’s over, and what a great experience it was.
(And not only because one of my pictures was used by the Guardian technology blog!)
Sure, there were annoyances. You’d think someone would have figured out how to provide stable wifi, even for a few hundred power users. And the joy at getting to keep the lovely lovely beanbags was tempered by some ugly beanbag-pinching that went on at the end. A strange event indeed if you can leave thousands of pounds worth of computer equipment unattended for hours without a worry, but have to be eagle-eyed in order to keep a free beanbag.
In the first draft of this post I wanted to talk about the people I met, but I’m sure I’d have forgotten someone, and a long name-dropping rundown is tedious to read. My feed list has gained weight, and I’m sure their writings and projects will filter into mine, and get mentioned then.
Reassuringly many, weren’t developers in the narrow sense. Or maybe we’re shifting towards an enlarged definition, with room for many shades that altogether make for good applications and sites.
Also, this front-page blog needs some love. I’ve changed the theme to something that doesn’t clash so horribly with the Eggcorn Database or Diacritiques — the new one’s a theme from the WordPress Themes site, by ShinRa. The previous one was originally a one-day effort to show to someeone the basics of WordPress Theming from scratch …
What Hackday did for me was to give me another nudge towards finding out where I fit into this complex software landscape — and to convince me to just take step by step on this road ahead of me. To pursue what I’m good at and passionate about, the way I’ve done it for the last 2-3 years.
Curiously, many of the conversations turned to internationalization. There are still huge and largely unsolved problems out there about how to build a site or service for an international audience, speaking an array of languages — typically, more than one per person — and writing, tagging and searching in every script imaginable.
Reading through the follow-up posts, I find it’s Jeremy whose summary is most in line with my own thoughts:
The atmosphere was indescribable. It sounds like it should be the most anti-social thing ever: a bunch of nerds with their laptops open engrossed in their own projects. But it was incredibly social! There was a real connection—the kind of connection that’s usually really hard to maintain in a crowd. The level of collaboration on display can only be described as life-affirming.
Having the people who actually design and build all those services, frameworks and tools right there in the same room, a table or two over, was a great catalyst. You could walk up to them and tell them what doesn’t work the way you expected, too. I’d never have got on speaking terms with half a dozen of APIs so fast, and the more experienced were always ready to give tips and show how it’s done.
So thanks, Yahoo!, BBC and sponsors, and thanks to the dozen of people who made it happen.
chris @ June 19, 2007