Last Saturday saw Brighton's first Hack Day, organised by the Farm collective as part of the Digital Festival, with the venue hire (and sherbet flying saucers) sponsored by Cogapp.

Around 40 assorted coders, thinkers and designers turned up at the Brighthelm Centre for a day of hackery: after a brief introduction by Paul Silver, it was time for everybody to 'tag' themselves using specially created stickers to indicate their abilities and requirements. Then we went round the room with each person saying who they were and what sort of thing they'd like to work on.

After that, we all divided into small groups to work on our chosen projects. I worked with Paul Perrin, Jonny Cross and Georges Panis to create a Facebook app called 'de-facer' which allows you to scribble on any of your friends' profile pictures using a Flash interface, and to have the resulting picture saved as an image and uploaded to a Facebook album. It's still distinctly a work-in-progress, but if you're interested, you can try it out by adding it to your Facebook profile.

There followed 6 hours of coding, interrupted only by lunch (sponsored by Magpie), and then it was time for the demos of the final projects. Apart from our own, the projects that were presented were as follows:

• Real-world text adventure by the Coding Dojo group
  A crazy Heath Robinson unholy mashup. A text-based adventure game was enhanced to allow real-world interaction, such as pouring hot coffee on a temperature-sensing chip, or scanning cards embedded with RFID tags. Extremely inventive and successfully delivered on time - a testament to Scrum and the the agile programming techniques that they used.
• Jokes by Tweet by Paul Silver and others
  This group used the Twitter API so that when you follow this 'person' it tells you a new joke every hour.
• In-browser bluescreen compositing by Jamie Campbell
  Jamie harnessed C++ and Python to allow you to mix bluescreened photos with other backgrounds within your browser.
• Semantic web friend finder by Tom Morris
  Tom created a PHP class to allow you to query RDF data to find related friends across different social media networks. This will be released as open source, and in a variety of languages shortly.
• ScOolBOok by Stamati Crook
  A web application to allow school children to upload and manage programmes they've written in scratch. The design aim was to be a 'Facebook for 8 year olds'

All in all Hack Day was a great success. There were loads of interesting and passionate people there, which made for a great atmosphere. Here's to another one next year!

Links:

Hack Day blog

Photos on Flickr