Hack24

I moved to Nottingham a couple of years ago, and discovered the amazing TechNottingham. A fiendishly well-run technical community, they organise multiple meet-ups every month, typically centred around a couple of talks and free food. I’m a regular attendee and occasional speaker. The community is enabled by the efforts of @MrAndrew and @MrsEmma, who run things with an apparent effortless efficiency that manifests itself primarily as animated gifs and a flamboyant stage presence.

Emma and Andrew Seward, driving a hackathon

This year, I was fortunate enough to get TechNottingham’s hottest ticket; Hack24. As part of a team of 4, I competed over 24 hours to build software in answer to a number of challenges set by sponsors. Our team (The Ruminant Ablutionists) used Microsoft’s Cognitive Services to build an Augmented Reality Face Recogniser app to assist with networking at a conference or event. We started unsure of whether the goal was too ambitious, but at the end of 24 hours, we not only had it working on iPhone and Android, but we were able to add a number additional features to allow us to enter multiple challenges.

Half of the Ruminant Ablutionists

After 24 hours of coding, we had 2 hours to produce a video for judging, and I found that to be far more stressful than the hacking. We shot some footage, and then Greg (our team’s WevDev) single-handedly converted our story-board into a submission.

Despite not winning anything (though we were finalists in two categories), I had a fantastic weekend. I met new people, played with some new technologies, and created a fully functioning prototype with my team.

The Hack24 team did an amazing job.  Here’s what impressed me as a participant:

  • Communication: I never didn’t know something that I needed to know.  This took me through registration, enabled me to form a team, and made sure we knew how not to set off the fire alarm on the day.
  • Facilities: The venue had enough space, the meals and refreshments were both excellent and relentless.
  • Challenges: The challenges were published before the event; they were varied and interesting, with enough scope for creativity.
  • Prizes:  The prizes were awesome; Drones, Smart-Speakers, Huge Easter Eggs, Pokemon, etc.  I think MHR did the best job as prize sponsors because they had a runner-up prize as well as a main prize.  In fact, runner-up prizes for each challenge would be my only suggestion for improvement in the Hack24 format, given the number of teams participating.
  • Fun:  Details like team stickers, a board-game corner, all-you-can-eat watermelon candy, non-technical prizes, and a surprise cameo from Mr Blobby helped to create an environment that encouraged the kind of anti-risk-averse thinking that a hackathon really needs.
  • Failure is Free: Most importantly, no team was required to submit a hack.  If things went badly for whatever reason, it could all be swept under the carpet with no loss of face.  Only the winners (and runners up) in each category got mentioned, and almost a fifth of teams didn’t submit an entry.

Despite ending the weekend exhausted, with a sore back, and complaining that I’m getting to old for this sort of thing, I’m really looking forward to next year.

Photo Credits: Andrew Acford

Dublin By Bike

I was in Dublin for OR2016 and the day after the conference, I was able to squeeze in a great tour of the city with Peter, Kim and Alan.  It was great.

Brodsworth Hall

We have English Heritage membership, and we took the opportunity to see a fine old Victorian country house.

More information at:

HDR Birmingham

I’m at an event in Birmingham, and have a nasty cold, so I’m messing around in my room with my camera.  Here’s the view:

The view from my hotel room.
The view from my hotel room.

Open Repositories Twitter Trends

I attended the Open Repositories 2014 conference last week, and harvested the conference twitter hashtag using an EPrints repository with the Tweepository package installed.  During the conference I generated wordles which I tweeted (the tweepository package makes that a two-click process).  These proved to be quite popular, so I thought I’d archive them here.  Anyone interested in the trends of the conference can do a comparison.  Here they are with their original tweet texts:

Continue reading “Open Repositories Twitter Trends”

Helsinki

I’m in Helsinki for a conference, and I’ve been walking around, taking some pictures.  Here are five of them.

White Faced Saki

I haven’t been out with my camera lately, but I did get a nice shot of a White Faced Sake at Marwell Zoo.  I had a play with my black-and-white processing software, and then with the colour processing software.  Here are the results for the same photograph.  I thought the black-and-white one was best at first, but the colour one is winning me over.

Marwell Portraits

On Noah’s birthday, we bought season tickets to Marwell Zoo, and we’ve been making good use of the tickets ever since.  I’ve also been playing (again) with black-and-white processing, just for fun 🙂  Here are some animal portraits.

Jinjang at Sunset

I spent the weekend at my mother-in-law’s house, way out in the countryside of Korea, in the village of Jinjang.  The weather was so hot that we spent most of the daytime just lounging around the house and avoiding the sun.  In the evening, I went out to take photos with the tripod I got for my birthday.  I also tried my hand at HDR photography for the first time, and I’m quite pleased with the result.