Dominic Kendrick takes the award for most amusing hack with his cautionary environmental tale Choose Wisely.
The Graham Tackley memorial award for most valuable hack controversially goes to Do you come here often?
And that’s it! Now its time for the voting.
Last hack! Applause for these two waiting to go until the very end of the day.
Zofia Korcz and Justin Pinner have been working on making the Guardian 404 pages more useful. Justin kicks off by pointing out this is not the most helpful page (at all). Short and sweet they demo their far more thoughtfully crafted page with clear onward journeys.
Another round of singing for another birthday. Hurrah!
Some light trolling of Cantlin Ashrowan in Seb and Lindsey’s talk. I look forward to that article exposing ageing hipsters.
Hangu by Seb Cevey and Lindsey Dew is about making editorial lives easier, integrating a hangout with content production inside the tool itself.
It’s like a chat channel inside the tools that builds on our internal user presence indicators. You can chat with individuals or have a “room” around the content. It also integrates with Google Chat so chats are integrated with Gmail (the primary channel for chat inside the Guardian offices).
They have created an additional option for the app that allows an editor to open Ophan directly from the app (we use browser extensions for these kind of tools on the web).
The website has a heatmap overlay that records where clicks on the page are happening. Again as an option you can see how many clicks the native front components are getting in near realtime.
I’ve left a bunch of accents off Frederic’s name, sorry.
Ophan is our internal analytics tool and Frederic, Jesus and Diego from the native apps team are going to talk about how they can create an app experience for it.
Team M.A.R.I.O. (Making All Readers Involved in the Observer) up now by Frank Hulley-Jones, Rob Phillips and of course Mario Andrade.
The Guardian has gorgeous supplements in the paper on the weekend but they are nowhere to be found on the website. This team has created beautiful pages for the web designed to make you feel like having a nice long read over a cup of coffee.
Creating bespoke sites for @guardianweekend sections #guhackday15 pic.twitter.com/Fp8dyvjCf2
Another single-person hack, Nick Satterly has created On this day. A Guardian digest for a particular day. Nick is nostalgic for our old frontend and I suspect some of you reading are too, one thing it did was a summary of a day, however that was based on the newspaper and Nick’s is based on what the audience were discussing on a given day.
You can see Nick’s hack for yourself. This is the coverage the day after the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices.
Come here often? Here’s hoping.
Chris Clarke, John Duffell, Chris Austin and Steve Vadocz are targeting the large percentage of visitors who only visit the Guardian once and leave. They are tailoring the experience based on where you have come from. Facebook users should get more scrolling whereas Google referrals probably know exactly what they want, so keep it short and sweet.
There are going to be just under forty hacks to vote on and only three prizes. It is going to be hard to remember all the hacks let alone vote on them!
Snapchat content is about “brand awareness”. The average Guardian reader is aged about 37, there isn’t really any content on the site aimed at them.
It’s not really clear what the app is about but I think the idea is to create a dedicated app with a less conservative design aesthetic.
Targeting a younger audience for the Guardian, nice work by @mattpointblank and co #guhackday15 pic.twitter.com/GBiQLkC9dv
The Power is YOURS! Hot tips to save the planet is on by Steve Vadocz, Mario Andrade and Michael McNamara.
Michael explains this is about recruiting our users as a force for change. Everyone is worried about the environment but most are not sure how to help.
Lexy Topping has just made the point that there is only one under-25 woman in the audience. However even Amy isn’t using Snapchat either.
Our app doesn’t require a Dig Dev soft porn session
Apologies to Jenny whose surname I mis-spelled earlier: Sivapalan, just one l. Also Wendy is disgruntled that I thought her hack name was sinister, but it is so she’s just going to have to be unhappy (or rename it) to “Cuddly hug links”.
The Guardian has a lot of community products: comments, Witness, Professional Networks and indeed the Opinion section where external contributors are encouraged to provide their personal view.
It’s demo time yo!
We’re opening with some call and response, Adam’s always the showman. Luke is now going to talk some sense.
Luke Taylor and Adam Fisher are going to talk about Guardian Responses next.
Live Newsdesk is up by Stephan Fowler, Amy Hughes, Richard Nguyen, Chris Pearson and Celine Bijleveld.
The Guardian now has a Live desk and this hack adds a column to the homepage pulling in all of the great new content which will make the page feel far more lively and increase discoverability.
The next hack by the same team (Sam, Ivor and Wendy) is about changing the related content in videos to relate to what you are currently watching. You can explore topics deeply as you continue to watch the current video. There is also a personal playlist that you can add videos to so that you can create a little backlog of videos you want to watch later. Its called Down the rabbit hole, watch video endlessly!
The next hack is called Where do you think you’re going? Seems a little sinister for a personalisation hack... This is an attempt to link the link the sponsored content we run in things like the Travel section to news about the areas, making it easy to visit if you want to.
Podcast player by Richard Nguyen is up now. He is showing off a spiffy visualiser with accompanying playlist for the series so you don’t have to leave the page to get to the next podcast.
Team Weather Oracle are here to illustrate the impact of climate change via the weather widget. It provides a future macro forecast with a fact about what climate change means for your area. A lightweight illustration of what the change in average global temperature means to you.
A simple but powerful addition to our existing functionality.
Now we have Guardian Communication Head Quarters which is a simple notification system and offline reading for theguardian.com
We need to create deeper, longer lasting relationships with out users.
Patrick Hamann
Next is Listen with Alan, save your articles for later on the app, then get the app to read them back to you while running. The voice synthesis is good but still a little bit creepy.
One of the features is that you can have the comments read to you while you read the article. Save your time by using all your senses!
Up next is NightVision 2.0 by Gwyn Lockett. He points out reading a screen at night affects your health, not least if it wakes up your partner sleeping next to you. Some nice animations where you can see the app and website with different visual styles.
We’re about halfway through the presentations now.
The next team features the newest Guardian developer Akash Askoolum who started today. Welcome Akash!
The team have been doing sentiment analysis on both content and their associated discussions. On film reviews, they are looking between the feelings of the critics and the commentors. Commentors like Will Smith a lot more than Pete Bradshaw does according to their analysis.
What do you get when you cross a Live Blog with an Article (both of which are Guardian content types)... Living Article!
Josh and Sam think that there are events where the detailed live blog format doesn’t serve the minute by minute format (like this blog you’re reading).
Exciting name for the next the hack: Flow Rider!
On big topics like climate change it’s hard to know where to start, which is where this hack comes in. It asks the user what they know on a particular topic at the bottom of an article and provides relevant next steps.
Stephen Wells (aka Swells) jokes that the environmental theme is really about configuring your environment. Therefore he’s built a tool to configure your environment with Cloud Formation.
He’s created a web app that uses your AWS account to create Cloud Formation scripts simply by answering questions about what you want to setup and how you want your existing resources to interact with the new stack.
Everyone laughed and clapped at this one but I didn't get it #environmenthack #guhackday15 pic.twitter.com/urt3gCfh6H
NoMFoMo is up next, it gives people the chance to get involved with the big conversations, some lovely sketches here by Laura Doward.
Working on a concept to help people keep up to date with news when they have little time: NOFOMO #guhackday15 pic.twitter.com/YBnRfrhqJ2
Tracer up now. Trying to tie polluters to those are politically or fiscally accountable to regular people.
They’ve used real data in Neo4J to trace the relationships between companies and their owners. They also use the data to identify the largest carbon emitting countries.
Up first is Guardian Publishing Frequency which visualises when content gets published over the course of the day. Next is Guardian of Things...a web of everything, ever. This links tags with metadeta. Finally he is simplifying taleo, the complex HR tool for appraisals.
A very productive day at the office for Rob!
Now Robert Rees is going to present three hacks...three!
Related: Tristram Hunt to quit as MP to become V&A director
The next team want to try to talk about mobile phone battery usage and trying to show users how much energy they use when reading the news.
Dominic Kendrick is now going to present Choose Wisely, a hack on the climate change theme.
If we don’t make the right choices now then we’re going to burn in a fiery hell of climate change!
Jenny Sivapalan, Robert Kenny and Celine Bijleveld have been investigating getting better, faster results out on election night.
The current system uses AP journalists and the FTP cloud of delay. The new system will use Guardian journalists and volunteers, Swarmize and the ability to embed the results directly into our content editor Composer.
Happy birthday to Jenny Sivapalan and a spontaneous round of Happy Birthday echoes through Shoreditch Town Hall.
Currently the reporting dashboards are generated by hand from a variety of data sources. This hack is using dashboard as a service software to generate metrics. Includes a funnel of user engagement.
Solo product management team now with Piers Jones taking about dashboards.
The team have built an app that implements the idea, we’re going to be shouting out the answers.
We get the first one wrong but Gideon gets the second one right, with the total number of people immigrating into the UK.
Never switch laptops during the presentations!
Quizitorial is a team project that attempts to gamify news catchups. Quizzes improve recall compared to just reading.
Gulu is today’s Guardian content with up voting to create a kind of Hacker News view onto the Guardian. Nic’s ambition is to solve the aggregation problem by allowing the Guardian readership to curate content and that means not just content from the Guardian but anything that is relevant.
It’s fast and furious on stage, next its Nic Long with Gulu
Now it’s Fabio Crisci with “No Fluff” which can read articles and do word analysis, complete with nice clean stats
John Duffell is talking about the issue of people rediscovering old content and sharing it on social with no context. So the simple answer is to add a banner.
Gideon Goldberg is now explaining how he’s hacked subtitles into the Guardian’s video page. The subtitles to come from Youtube and are the crowd-translated into different languages. Not sure how they get into the player though.
Subtitles aren’t just about accessibility they also open up video to global audiences via translation
It is possible to search the data and find out what both the Guardian and the Telegraph pay MPs for their contributors.
The member’s register is pretty much free text in a HTML page. They’ve scraped the pages and attempted to create a structured data format from the text of the page.
We found the money by looking for pound signs followed by numbers
Graham Tackley and Phil Wills are going to be talking about interesting MPs, and what they’ve discovered from ingesting the register of MPs interests.
Okay folks we’re about to go into the presentations... the first speaker is on the podium...
It would be amiss to ignore our coffee team for this hack day: the brilliant team from Noble Espresso – powering the Guardian’s hack day since yesterday morning.
Here’s a hack group planning something – world domination, possibly, but more likely their demo presentation for this afternoon.
Our UX architect Helene is giving a class for our team in giving strong presentations. For better or worse, the end result of these 24 hours of hacking lives or dies on the strength of the three minute presentation later today. Hopefully all these people will go on and nail their presentations thanks to Helene.
Here’s what they’re all playing for today: one of the three trophies up for grabs.
We’re into the second day of our Guardian hack event and spirits are high. People are arriving, coffee is being avidly consumed and more than one team are reconsidering their ideas from yesterday in the cold light of day. More soon.
That’s it for the day - lots of happy (and tired) hackers. More tomorrow...
Finally, here’s a few folks who are tired of the deskbound life.
More diagrams: here’s Jenny Sivapalan demonstrating how her team’s election-themed hack project might work.
Here’s a complex technical architecture diagram from renowned funster Will “hipster” Franklin:
Things are starting to wrap up here for Day One of our hack day. The coffee folks of the fantastic Noble Espresso have packed up and left and our caffeine levels mean some Guardian staff are beginning to flag.
We’ve also had a suggestion from Twitter of a possible hack, from a perhaps disgruntled non-Londoner...
an edition of the guardian which removes all articles relating to "london"
Hacking is in full flow: here’s what some of our journalists are working on:
@LauraOliver @subhajitb working on quizzes at the hackday! #guhackday15 pic.twitter.com/1FLkMeccRP
One of our editorial colleagues, Lexy Topping, is hacking along with us today. She’s just posted this Vine clip showing a hint of the action here at Shoreditch Town Hall:
It's all going on at #guhackday15. https://t.co/PU921r3drt
Lunchtime is wrapping up here as hacking begins in earnest. We’re being fed Korrito who have delivered us a huge array of delicious Korean food:
Here’s another shot of a team in action working on a hack idea around climate change:
The climate change hack team @Guardian #guhackday15 pic.twitter.com/YbFO6TadKc
Here’s a lovely photo of our brilliant venue before our team arrived and filled it full of discarded coffee cups and laptops:
Stunning hack space for the first Guardian hack days of 2015 #guhackday15 pic.twitter.com/iykSQfaMlD
We’ve also had a clue from our developer Patrick Hamann about his plans for the day – sounds like there’s something around offline reading happening in at least one team.
Today I will mostly be hacking around with ServiceWorker and the Push API at the @gdndevelopers hack day #guhackday13
We’ve just finished pitching back the initial ideas and heard some fascinating things, including quizzes, mobile analytics, “save-for-later” across all your devices and something mysterious about “sliders”. Watch this space.
We’re being hosted in the beautiful surroundings of Shoreditch Town Hall, a Grade II listed building. Right now, our hundred-strong team are engaged in an ideas session, brainstorming concepts and ideas about what the Guardian can do digitally to continue to innovate and experiment on the web. And probably some stuff with robots, too.
We are off for Guardian Hack Day February 2015! Now to launch this blog...
Continue reading...]]>The setting at London’s Barbican was already inspiring, with its mix of concrete brutalism contrasting with the indoor jungle. Around a hundred attendees gradually filed into one of the cinema-style auditoriums and the two day event began.
Continue reading...]]>
And we've ended the day on a well-deserved standing ovation for the Hack Day committee, who put this all together. That's it from us! Thanks for following our updates and stay tuned - you may see these hacks in future...
And the overall winner goes to... Stephan's Breaking News!
Most potential value goes to... Ribot!
Most entertaining hack goes to... Ballot Box!
Shortly announcing the hack winners, stay tuned....
So it's voting time now, but also beer time. Mmm beer.
This hack turns a standard (unstructured) tag and turns it into a 'super' tag! This passes the tag off to a system that enriches each of the tags to add more semantic data to our tag structure.
Something about tag strings... Sorry, @JonGuardian #ddhd pic.twitter.com/6dQpaoyN8X
It even has an auto mode to identify what mood the chat message is coming through, even "sarcasm"
This is a hack to help add some emotion to the chat systems the devs use a lot.
Big @kenlim pic.twitter.com/oRoZ4e9w14
Ken next. Can't wait
Ballot Box: A hack that creates fun, shareable polls in the run up to elections. Collecting audience data on the fly to measure and inform audience opinion. The polls would be simple yet powerful. This team has even done audience research - seems popular. Solid demo showing multiple data sets gathered from a single poll about Scottish independence.
Jon: As someone responsible for the CMS tools I'm all ears! Looks great!
Fun simple sharable polls. I'm interested. pic.twitter.com/iZPrGoloJs
Not to infringe copyright... :/ pic.twitter.com/l99BpMB9xy
A tool which shows what Guardian content could look like on wearable tech #ddhd https://t.co/jXPHZIboox
Have Eye Got News For You: a Google Glass hack with that reading speed thing that let's you read word-by-word.
It imagines Guardian content with wearable tech. We paused in typing because we were told to pay attention...
Now we've got Have EYE Got News For You, not to be confused with the popular tellybox show because we changed the name, innit.
Short but sweet presentation just passed - essentially a bar which tells you where the article is and where the comments are.
Hot topic in the Guardian at the moment. Google's right to be forgotten. This hack provides a way to identify who might have asked for an article to be removed from google.co.uk.
Rascal: a reporting dashboard for running tests in Scala (a.k.a. journalist pretends to understand technical hack presentation).
Matt, our valiant MC is up now. He's unlocked our CMS to the world! Thankfully only on his machine. The hack allows anyone to log in to our CMS and then create their own Guardian article as a collection of their favourite content on the Guardian. This would be published to a distinct URL so can be shared with friends and on social media. These can then be embedded inside Guardian produced content for additional kudos.
@mattpointblank doing his best impression of a regular Guardian reader. #ddhd @JonGuardian pic.twitter.com/3bM2IxYzaE
Hack about reviews and how we could provide a way to write a review in the future. Everything from a snap judgement about whether the Guardian review reflects your opinion.
Now a hack aimed at finding different ways to connect with readers BTL, including a Reddit gold style reward system, easy correction suggester and new article proposer. Also something about emotions.
Swells is up again and he is demoing another great hack. It allows our editorial team to find tweets, youtube videos and Guardian videos from within our Composer CMS
Here's that preview tool Swells demo'ed earlier:
Swells demoing a very cool demo of how to preview across multiple devices pic.twitter.com/EZ88GdnXRy
So, for example, the MH370 story. You can put in bits of content, not just from the Guardian, which is an easy way to create a timeline, inspired by the timelines we have now on the live blogs. Lovely!
Next up is Timeline prototype: a tool which helps our readers figure out what's happened in a big, long-running story.
Previewmatic: when editorial preview articles in production, they only ever look at the desktop site. Bad editorial. This hack cycles through various previews, so we can see what an article looks like on next gen, mobile and as part of a tag page.
Hack now to create an information element to a Guardian story to help provide background to a story. Yes, basically, I haven't done that justice at all. Sorry.
Story Box encourages people to share more stories that they find interesting but putting them in a box. Shares would be toted up and tracked, so readers can see their share history and unlock rewards for lots of sharing.
It will "automagically" reserve things for you and could save us lots of money for more hack days, hurrah! More pizza next year, yes?
@tackers talking about Amazon reserved instances. pic.twitter.com/aYhCgiDw1t
Oooohh... pic.twitter.com/PNn8bwlcSc
Next up is Ribot. Sounds like a frog noise, actually stands for Reserved Instance Bot.
Next hack - iOS hack to add Guardian information to the dropdown menu to surface useful information, sport information and a daily quiz or poll.
Taking next gen web offline: We've had 'save for later' for years in apps but not for the web purists out there. This hack allows readers to access content when they have no network connection - ergo, we should be developing for "offline first"...
Lots of love for Patrick's hack there
Patrick presenting his "save for later" functionality - without requiring a connection to the net #ddhd pic.twitter.com/BQde3fysuQ
Guardian Angel hack: divining your personalised homepage. #ddhd @JonGuardian pic.twitter.com/6sFm8u9zGT
Oliver and Seb from the Digital CMS team (Jon). Hack called Guardian angel. The idea is to offer a service that might help find content you might have missed and then show you a custom home page. Help you keep track of series that you often read but never make it to the Guardian's home page. This will put your most read sections of the Guardian where you can find them.
FYI one of our French friends seemed to enjoy Le Guardian:
@elenacresci LE GUARDIEN POINT FR
So if you've mixed up things are wrong, you could easily find where the problem is. Pretty ace - and all from the shower! (except for the computer bits)
It's called C.P Bot (hat tip to the esteemed C.P Scott): a tool which helps you figure out where something is wrong, eg if the slugs don't match.
Jonathan reveals his hack was a shower idea!
Jonathan Hyde is up next so he's not liveblogging right this second, unless he has talents we're unaware of...
Soulmates conversations should lead to IRL meet ups. This hack makes that easier by bringing a map tool into the Soulmates app and suggesting potential locations between the two, er, mates. Among suggestions are rooftops bars, parties, exhibitions and, wait for it, Guardian Masterclasses!
I'M ON THE SCREEN #ddhd pic.twitter.com/q69QU8HwxH
Kaelig doing two hacks - greedy. And he's started with lots of buzz words. A reader profile page with a git-hub style overview of how active they been from leaving reviews to reading in specific sections. Could also recommend what content you've missed based on what you usually like to read. Maybe.
"LeGuardian" does what it says on the tin - puts a bit of French-flavour into the site.
Le Guardian!! pic.twitter.com/AT6588jyyv
A French-themed presentation next! Bonjour bonjour
Tag Miner: How good is our tagging? The aim of this hack is to allow journalists to find the tags they didn't know they needed (#unknownknowns) and to rule out the tags they'd never want to use.
Anti-tags... Like anti-matter... Kinda pic.twitter.com/hTKFhKV5bI
A challenge to test your news knowledge. @jonphyde #hackday pic.twitter.com/uvYgNrLow5
Next up we've got an app demo to give our readers a news challenge every day. Find the answers or content to each of the questions and you score well depending on the speed you achieve.
The alerts can be personalised to specific sections of the site. So specific users get specific alerts. Lovely!
It's a pretty nifty tool which is getting a fair amount of whoops from our audience.
By the way, I (Jon), have been joined by the wonderful Elena Cresci and Fred McConnell who have been involved from our editorial team for the last two days.
Next up is team Breaking News, a different way to do breaking news on the new version of the Guardian site. The idea is to break news according to specific parts of the site, such as the US site or the Sports section.
The RecipEasy hack: this team have built a recipe finding tool with lots of features like search, technique cards and an in-built timer which follows your progress.
Lots of love for a great recipes hack
Everyone's favourite hack subject - recipes! pic.twitter.com/q99m19cldv
The second hack is all about languages. The team has used Google Translate to automatically change various articles into native languages. The team admits the translation isn't perfect, of course - but as the article is shared, the translations are improved using Google's own "improve" tool. They've also built in a log which tracks whether users actually use it – allowing us to predict which languages we should invest in.
Translation tool pic.twitter.com/LyjlmWDPbk
Time for the first presentation: considered commenting #ddhd pic.twitter.com/K1GCRPey9m
So Guardian hack day just finished - and 33 hacks to present! @JonGuardian
First up is a hack about commenting... a way to highlight commentors who have a knowledge of the subject matter.
And we're off!
As Will “Skrillex” Franklin points out, “for the department that invented ‘Key Events’, this liveblog doesn’t have many”. It’s a fair point – and what event could be more “key” than pizza arriving at a hack day?
Teams discuss their options
Things are becoming tense as the time for demoing hacks approaches.
The room is quiet but full of concentration.
Things are quiet as we enter the second afternoon of Hack Day. Teams are beavering away, knowing demo time is only a couple of pizza-fuelled hours away. We're also gently pulsating in time with Kraftwerk's 22-minute epic, Autobahn, which seems to have become a Guardian tradition as some joker always puts it on the collaborative Spotify playlist we're listening to in here.
Morning all. Apologies for not wrapping up last night. As per the usual pattern, the evening wound down to a quiet close, people drifting off to a local establishment.
This morning starts with breakfast for those who have made it here in time, and a general sense of concentration in the (very warm and slightly clammy) air.
My first hack, “Le Guardian”, is live on Bastille Day! http://t.co/RYbQNv0wdM #ddhd #bastilleday #vivelafrance
Guardian hackday underway at Lyst Studios - http://t.co/5tTeA1scs3 pic.twitter.com/43xpiLH9U2
My first hack, “Le Guardian”, is ready to go. Hoping to get it live very soon — https://t.co/Q278i06OVm #ddhd
Status update: Ambient sound level is going down as screens start filling with code...
If you are interested, you can listen along to the tunes keeping the devs entertained on this spotify playlist:
This is what I'm doing today innit http://t.co/boEzatvZfi
Right, that's it, hacking is starting. 24 hours to turn an idea into a 3 minute demo. Smoke, mirrors and JS fakery are all very much of the order of the day.
@rcrphillips giving their ideas which involve drones :/ pic.twitter.com/xuaDR1FB7x
Making our way through the various team's ideas. A couple more
Someone's just suggested a "Have you read the article before commenting?" quiz. YES PLEASE #ddhd
@elenacresci sharing their ideas pic.twitter.com/Lxt8TBdCX6
Hack day ideas starting to come together https://t.co/V1kk86kbbN
Ideas are brewing... pic.twitter.com/SxBMwaOH1H
@shfitz sharing her thoughts and inspiring us to build some exciting hacks pic.twitter.com/Z1YZRl7oA4
@kenlim sharing some thoughts on how to build a successful hack... pic.twitter.com/dT9kl48DLW
Lots of people! pic.twitter.com/s3KlM0n1Zv
Hack day is kicking off with @mattpointblank pic.twitter.com/UEzuriLME5
We are kicking off another Guardian Hack Day event this morning.
During the next 29 hours the developers within the Guardian will spend time working on ideas. The aim is to have some form of prototype to present back at around 3pm tomorrow. This doesn't always go to plan as our Phil Wills will testify. Sometimes showing something that doesn't work is just as useful. Honest.
Continue reading...]]>The boss in question is programming guru Brendan Eich, creator of the hugely popular JavaScript language and general web evangelist. Mozilla have been operating under an acting CEO, Jay Sullivan, for over a year and announced on Monday their decision to appoint Eich to the role after his 15 years there, most recently as CTO. The controversy stems from a $1,000 donation Eich made in 2008 in his own name – albeit with Mozilla's name listed alongside it, as US law stipulates – to the Proposition 8 campaign, an amendment to California law which outlawed same-sex marriage.
Continue reading...]]>
So the votes have been counted, double checked by an independent judge (full disclosure, they weren’t). The winners are:
For the most entertaining hack was won by Andrew Mason
I'll update that post later with the designs
Now a really exciting surprise update from Graham Tackley, the results of the sticker competition.
Here we go. First up a few words from our Director of Digital Tanya Cordrey.
Wow, that was hard work. We're done. 36 hacks, some amazing hard work and a slightly sporadic ability to get the presentations on the screen.
The votes are being cast, beers, wine and soft drinks are being consumed. Check back in a few minutes for the results. Queue TV pause.
Voting underway. pic.twitter.com/BG6kT9yBQu
The last hack of the day. Via Google Hangout. Justin Pinner and Huma Islam bring us: ReporterBot. Sent from the future, a real, working robot to assist our journalists. Video to follow shortly.
Vector graphing tools pic.twitter.com/Ni7Tlm4joF
Penultimate hack of the day brought to you by Doughnuts (Cantlin Ashrowan and Will Franklin). This follows up on the details we put earlier. This gives us a tool for quickly creating infographics for our content really quickly. It is really really impressive. I am personally really excited about this.
Last up, the doughnuts pic.twitter.com/2ozVNpSNfE
Sébastien Cevey has Prefectionist (sic) for helping our Guardian staff report spelling mistakes in our published content. I'm sure this live blog could do with lots of attention.
The prefectionist pic.twitter.com/2DP76nZcvt
Matt Osbourne, Cian Weeresinghe and Matt Anders aka GUI, with their Interactive Node Graph Explorer, a tool that charts relationships between articles. Nodes galore!
Amazing sound effects pic.twitter.com/eJj4E0LFn8
Mario Andrade and Gary Newby have worked on some UI Sounds for iOS Next Gen app. Humm... He's aware of the fine line between annoying and amusing. And so far is walking that line admirably. Lots of swishes and plops.
Andrew Bulhak presenting his Witness Fly-Through hack. This presents content from the Witness API in an animated 3D fly-through. He also receives the biggest round of applause of the day for his second hack - Guardian Ipsum. The second reference to quinoa of the afternoon.
Flying Witness pic.twitter.com/tpq1686w2M
now for a science lesson from Wenjia pic.twitter.com/860EcVCkSn
Wenjia Zhao is on stage talking about her hack to track what happens to traffic to an article when we make changes to our website. This is really useful to know if we make do something that negatively affects the experience in real time. Very cool. Big clap.
Another slight reshuffle, and Richard Nguyen is next on stage with yet more football-related shenanigans. Huzzah! He has created a videprinter that users the Press Association API to provide live score updates.
guardian Grandstand pic.twitter.com/aPoSVaDzRU
Robert Rees, in blatant disregard for the running order, is up next. He was part of the team that presented earlier in the day on a new Developers' website. Further details and a working demo.
Rob Philips also threw up a quick hack that I personally really wanted, this is a real time view of our editorial colleagues around the world who log into our web editorial tools and create our wonderful content. Also from a beach in Belgium right?
Who is using Composer on a beach in Belguim? pic.twitter.com/Kxxp1uQT42
Marc, Rob, Neal and Matt presenting their Football Player Profile Viewer, a widget for readers or journalists to look up stats on specific football players. No expense spared on design.
And our survey says... pic.twitter.com/1XhdjeBuq4
Darren Hurley is up next with a hack called '1,000,000 Guardian Readers Said.' Articles have tags.This we know. An idea that our readers might want to suggest tags in the format of a popular tv game. All rights reserved.
Look who's turned up for the hack day! pic.twitter.com/EdazEMhvan
Nick Haley presenting Guardian Editorialist, which he hacked with Lee Simpson, Penny Allen and Sophie Turner. A new and much improved version of our current contributor page.
Smart contributor pages. pic.twitter.com/sqLvaynmak
Nicolas Long is up next with a hack called Clojure client for the Content API. We really need to work our ability to name things.
For those in the know, this is apparently a good thing.
Biggest team of the day so far: Rob Berry, Nick Smith, Adam Fisher, Chris Mulholland and Jenny Sivapalan, also known as the flatMap Five. They sound somewhat like a hip-hop supergroup. Sadly they are not.
Team Shameless pic.twitter.com/7hLosDuOmj
Seán Clarke has a hack called Indian election predictions. It kinda does what it does what it says on the tin. It's a basic hack to try and predict the outcome of the upcoming Indian elections. He's helping us understand the scale of the election and why it is a big deal. And it is a very big deal.
Sounds important pic.twitter.com/IpkMb06TcX
Simon Huggins with Spread the News, a Chrome extension for adding curated lists of content to the website. Warning: some of this hack may have been faked.
Lots of people up next, Seb Cevey, Lindsey Dew, Ken Lim & Chris Pearson with their hack 'News Schedule Analyser'. Less details on this one as it is about an internal system.
it's Ken. pic.twitter.com/0n0y6eBH6y
Ulyssa Mac hacked up an interesting hack (Presented by Wendy Orr). Ulyssa has pulled in a responsive checkout page that will work with a variety of our Guardian products so it will work for mobiles.
Dominic Kendrick and Wendy Orr with a Roots Manuva inspired hack called 'GuardianWitness the Fitness'. They have created an article page sidebar component that links to related GuardianWitness content. Dominic is also the creator of a wonderful beard. Great work on both accounts.
Stephen Wells (Swells) is up next talking about his amazing new game World of Tags. Technical difficulties abound getting started. Two player game to see how can get the longest combination of tags. He's used almost every hipster web language going, Angular, web sockets, actors etc etc. I don't really know what I am talking about really.
SparkPlug! That's the name of Stephan Fowler's hack, which creates tiny dynamically generated graphs of page view data for easy embedding on any page or on any tool.
Live traffic sparklines pic.twitter.com/3h1KZBm6n4
Graham Tackley, Patrick Sterling have been working on some stuff that I can't show you the details of but it is very core to help the Guardian understand how well we are doing and where we could be doing better.
Lord Data himself, it's Graham Tackley pic.twitter.com/I47MiQby02
Phil Wills is showing a hack that ACTUALLY WORKED. What a massive disappointment. He's upgraded our deployment systems to work with other 3rd party applications. Cool, if you like that kind of thing. (Note: Product Manager bias, I am sure it is very good really).
Content API notifications next, kindly brought to you by Nicolas Long.
On stage now it's Pushermen, that's Julian Fitzell, Alastair Jardine, Dave Evans, and James Gorrie. Their hack is called Trigger, a browser push notification service. A few tense moments, but it worked!
Our new breaking news on desktop service - TRIGGER pic.twitter.com/4eoFJg4WUt
Roberto Tyley is up next with Guardian Sesame. This actually signs you into the guardian from your mobile phone. Sweet!
Chris Cross now with GuMPY (that's the Guardian (Football) Match Playback sYstem folks). A very retro hack that uses PA data to visualise football matches for fans.
More football wizardry from Chris Cross aka Gumpy. pic.twitter.com/xww5Tx8W1Y
Stephen Gran, Simon Hildrew have been working on some stuff I didn't understand! Sorry, will get more details soon.
Andrew Mason now with a tool to allow users to make their own Guardian comic strips and share the results.
Gideon Goldberg up next to talk about Native Advertising.
Football robot pic.twitter.com/EWiJK4Rybu
Chris Clark & Matt Chadburn have been working with our football data and have been working to see what is possible to do with it to spruce it up a bit. Make the data points into something a bit more tangable.
Matt Andrews now, hacking as well as organising the entire day. Good effort! Matt has mocked up a Guardian mood board to show user moods and sentiments.
The Guardian moodboard is feeling sad. Poor thing. pic.twitter.com/cgMbIs0rCr
Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent, Mario Andrade, Duncan Hammond have worked on a great new potential video representation for Guardian content. Very impressive.
Robert Rees, Paul Lloyd and Oliver Ash are third up, presenting the new developers' website that they have created to outline what our developers do. They've even made a snazzy video!
Ollie joining us from the ISS pic.twitter.com/RPikS3fL3p
Up next Jesus Gumiel with a Soulmates hack that uses bluetooth and qrcodes to look for potential partners.
Ok, so Rupert Bates, Tom Grinsted have got the Guardian onto Google Glass. No surprises there. Was blinking cool.
First quinoa gag of the day pic.twitter.com/pssVKi7Hom
The seats are filling...
First up is Rupert Bates, Tom Grinsted with a hack called "OK Guardian". Any guesses as to what this one is about?!?
And to help me live blog I am joined by Anthony Sullivan on Twitter photos and Sam Spencer with words. Excited.
Just about to start
Here's a quick clip showing the atmosphere as everyone gears up for the final charge before presentations. There may or may not be some cheeky behaviour on show from one of the Guardian's QAs.
Got a few tweets floating around, here are some of the latest
Joke on the back of my penguin bar 'Why do penguin's wear glasses? To help with their ice-sight' what larks! #ddhd
Wow, @OliverJAsh doesn’t mess about! #ddhd
#ddhd pic.twitter.com/AV7Rx4GA59
"Helping" with a hack: Guardian+Glass. Guardiass? Glassian? Grauniglass? #ddhd pic.twitter.com/GZJfcFEfRg
The glass in action. Lookin' good @TomGrinsted :) pic.twitter.com/BCvX7vf132
Here's a few photos of the work so far this morning...
Matt Andrews here, a fellow hack day organiser with Jon. My hack is sort of a meta-hack: it's been around organising the hack day itself. I've also had a go at a "real" hack involving automatically figuring out the mood of our audience: are people mostly happy, indifferent, or sad? The data is proving a bit complex to amass (a variety of inputs including comment sentiment, page load time and social sharing) so I'm at the stage of considering faking it all for the demo. Watch this space to see just how well this idea goes... or not.
Day two is spinning up with the help of caffeine and breakfast. There seems to be a general sense of optimism in the air, or maybe that's just the wafts of the espresso machine next door.
We are now driving headlong towards the presentations this afternoon at 3pm.
And that is that for today, join us here tomorrow for more hacking fun. Especially tune in tomorrow afternoon for the presentations and awards.
This might be the last post tonight, going to quickly chat with Nicolas Long and then call it a day. Nick works on our Content API and has a myriad of ideas he wants to try out. I'm worried his demo tomorrow might take longer than he has available!
First up is a notification service for the Content API, a constant stream of events; attempting to implement caching for the Content API; playing around with Netflix's open source tool called Chaos Monkey to test how resilient our infrastructure is; possibly writing a client for the Content API in Clojure. Why Clojure you might ask? Well, because he likes it. It is also an attempt to smuggle it in. I bet our Architects will keep a beady eye on him.
New chatting opportunity has come up with Jenny Sivapalan and Robert Berry. However, well, umm, it isn't for public consumption so let's move on quickly.
Chris Cross is working with the football data we have from our external sources. He is trying to pull together something that might visualise the pitch at any point of the match and update it in real time. Currently it isn't working but we still have hours to go.
Quick shout out to Emily Gray who put in a lot of hard work to get this hack day organised and sadly has moved on to pastures new so can not join us in person but is definitely with us in spirit.
Now chatting with Stephan Fowler who is doing something that I am personally very excited about. He is creating a service that takes a data set (like page views) and converts it to a sparkline on the server and passes back a png to the requesting service. This means that within our editorial tools, we can show visually how an individual piece of content is performing at a glance. I really hope this one works in prod by the end of tomorrow.
Grabbing 5 minutes with Sean Clarke who heads up our UK Interactives team. Sean is exploring wither he can build an interactive elections results for the upcoming India elections. It needs you to enter your predictions about swing and the impact of the new AAP party and then calculates what might happen in each seat.
So the group of QAs I just tweeted (Gideon, Marc, Rob and Neal) are furiously typing away to pull together a new visual explorer of our football API data. Parsing through JSON lists and calls is bread-and-butter for most of our developers but for the rest of us, something with buttons and boxes is a little more friendly. Like our QAs really.
What do you call a group of QAs? A SET of QAs?? :) Sorry, bad geek joke. pic.twitter.com/P1MaAmY5Ta
Catching up with Cantlin, a fellow Product Manager, to find out a little more about his hack. He's working with Will Franklin to see if he can tackle a real problem the Guardian has. Our newspaper carries many beautiful infographics on a daily basis. These infographics help inform our readers and help deliver more digestible facts. It is unfortunate that many of these are absent from our website. If they are included they usually consist of a saved picture of the infographic, something that then does not render will on a mobile.
Cantlin and Will think there might be something we could do in our tools to help us create a rich representation of data without needing to create a picture from indesign or embed a third party tool.
#ddjd JEFFBOT IS ALIVE /cc @jonphyde @mr_mr pic.twitter.com/aaRLCtp53a
May yet get ideas about Glass-enabled journalism (working name: The Journalator) together for #ddhd. #thoughtsOnGlass pic.twitter.com/7belHPvL3e
Now that lunch is being digested it might be time to go and bother a few people and find out what they are doing. Roving live-blogging time.
Feeling v. happy to be at the Guardian Hack Day — Live Blog http://t.co/LcRSB5l8ce
*Best Attenborough voice* What we have found here is the very rare Swells in its native habitat. @steppenwells pic.twitter.com/Ea7Bk6lckH
Real pleasure to welcome Ben Holland to the Guardian's development team. Already hard at work building something, exactly what, well, you will have to wait and see tomorrow afternoon.
Better late than never, here's a few choice photos from the idea presentations earlier.
Serious stuff. Concentrate, concentrate. https://t.co/lZln0Z7Wwm
We're also very grateful for the superb coffee from Macintyre Coffee and very much looking forward to lunch from the Bow Food van outside. Breakfast was fab but feels like a long time ago now.
@JonGuardian hope @MacintyreCoffee and @bow_food are doing you well :)
We've finished the ideas presentations and settling into the real business of creating some magic. From the very short (some longer than others, mentioning no names Kaelig) presentations there's a lot of great ideas floating around.
The view from the stage... pic.twitter.com/HC0glLV1eF
A hive of activity https://t.co/Jpnvm67O2S
At this stage it would be appropriate to give a HUGE thanks to our host venue, Shoreditch Village Hall especially James and Dan who have been amazing. Such a lovely space for this kind of activity.
The view from the stage... pic.twitter.com/HC0glLV1eF
The ideas sess is starting to draw to the close, lots of people trying to get out of being the person from their team who has to present!
Whoops, missed a team hiding in a side room https://t.co/5OutcJnBdp
And the rest https://t.co/smmAIrwsyL
And more https://t.co/7La824PUtx
Still flowing https://t.co/SD4FVwyKMO
Ideas are flowing https://t.co/rlILxeREAE
There is a definite buzz in the room pic.twitter.com/eRhSFIrULu
Entering the ideas phase, lots of great discussions happening
@dominickendrick sharing how he isn't part of the dom... Awful developer humour... pic.twitter.com/QDAcsXGZdf
@TomGrinsted talking about @googleglass pic.twitter.com/Qr0102bkQc
@philwills trying to inspire our devs with some new shiny web developments that might inspire them pic.twitter.com/g381AoHHea
@nicksatterly from our lovely Websys team pic.twitter.com/VDS15KnAMp
@sihil taking about more cool Websys systems to make our lives better. Phew they are moving fast! pic.twitter.com/Epy7sq4xEp
@theefer sharing some of our (my team's) brand spanking new products pic.twitter.com/fet3wvnBgE
Wendy Orr sharing about the very cool @GuardianWitness platform and how we could make use of it pic.twitter.com/h4cjsuACwU
@rtyley talking out our identity products pic.twitter.com/ouI7YtwvzK
@jenny_sivapalan sharing about the amazing content api pic.twitter.com/GgD2cLDDjA
Fantastic to have Andrew Miller join us and share his thoughts. pic.twitter.com/N2c19xWx6b
And we're off!
@mattpointblank is on stage and we are off! pic.twitter.com/9lTwGvbMyx
Matt Andrews is about to take the stage to kick this off officially
#ddhd on irc dot freenode dot net (/j ddhd)
@kungpochicken settling himself in pic.twitter.com/GIE1NzxYFT
People are gathering. @theefer is present, it's going to be good pic.twitter.com/Xeg4fqpeeL
We are kicking off another Guardian Hack Day event this morning.
During the next 29 hours the developers within the Guardian will spend time working on ideas. The aim is to have some form of prototype to present back at around 3pm tomorrow. This doesn't always go to plan as our Phil Wills will testify. Sometimes showing something that doesn't work is just as useful. Honest.
Continue reading...]]>When news of the former basketball star's trips to the "hermit kingdom" first broke in February, it was treated with the same wry amusement as the story of the discovery of a mythical "unicorn lair" in Pyongyang. Of all the Americans we could conceivably imagine reaching out to the reclusive dictatorship, the choice of Rodman is perhaps equally as improbable as the unicorn. In a country where hairstyles are state-mandated and the US is routinely described as a land of decadence and aggression, the basketball player is an odd choice of ambassador, to say the least.
I'm calling on the Supreme Leader of North Korea or as I call him "Kim", to do me a solid and cut Kenneth Bae loose.
— Dennis Rodman (@dennisrodman) May 7, 2013
Your friend probably also will deny that Camp 14 exists, which is the official position of his government. If he does, you can show him pictures of it on your phone.
How much they respected their leader. When you have the whole country out at 3am to build statues and sh*t – for free – that makes you a real leader [laughs]. You don't pay them, and they still love you.
Continue reading...]]>Four of the Guardian's Digital Development team went along as mentors to see what the next generation of creative techies were up to. This blogpost offers a conversational overview from the Guardian staff about what we learned from our participation in YRS 2013, grouped by topic.
Continue reading...]]>"Are they … ?"
Continue reading...]]>Here at the Guardian we've been keen to dive into this approach ourselves. The benefits to us as developers are clear: we can avoid the headache of re-implementing features and concepts across multiple platforms multiple times, and streamline our release process to allow us to push updates and enhancements out to several of these platforms simultaneously. The benefit to the end user is the experience of browsing a webpage which is tailored for their particular viewing context, rather than attempting a one-size-fits-all approach which either forces everybody into a lowest common denominator pigeon hole, or assumes a high bar of entry which not all visitors can match.
Continue reading...]]>