So, Hack Day was pretty amazing. The event was organized by Yahoo! and the BBC, with several other sponsors providing interesting thought capital, demonstrations, inspiration and prizes.
The event was meant to start out with 4 sessions of 1-hour presentations by various people at BBC, Flickr, Yahoo, and other places. They demonstrated APIs, available data, and other services available for all the attendees to hack up and play with. I think there’s too much for me to cover in one post, so I’m going to break it up a little and talk about each of the interesting things that I saw, heard, learned about, and hacked.
I missed the first session, because it took me a lot longer to get from Heathrow to Alexandra Palace than I expected. But while I was signing in, my friend and one-time coworker, Chris Sizemore, popped over and said hello. He works for the BBC, so he was partly there in the capacity of helping to make the event run smoothly.
By the way, Alexandra Palace is gorgeous, with an amazing view of London. This high vantage point would turn out to be a bit of a problem later in the day, but in the early morning, it was pretty impressive.
For more about the event, see my posts on:
Meaningful Data 