Bagel Belly Blog

Frackday

Yesterday and today is Hackday London, taking place at Alexandra Palace. I headed down bright and early yesterday, arriving just after 9am, for what I hoped would be a couple of days of interesting stuff. It was certainly interesting, but not quite in the way I'd expected.

First of all, I have to say congratulations to the Yahoo/BBC team for pulling this together. The logistics of getting 500 developers in one place are not easy, and the initial impression was a good one: well-organised, smooth registration, and walking into the main hall with the lights strobing and the smoke machine at full-pelt certainly added to the "wow" factor of seeing hundreds of the smartest and brightest minds all in one place.

It was unfortunate then that nature and networks conspired to screw up much of the first day. Nature? Lightning strikes. Networks? The BTOpenzone wifi laid-on especially for the event wasn't up to the task, and was failing every 40 minutes or so until late evening, when it finally stabilised. Of course, when you're in a room full of Web 2.0 mashup experts all trying to leverage the public APIs and web data silos that make up the whole thing, this is a serious problem. No network = no APIs = no hacks. Which pretty much ruined the whole raison d'être of the day. I wish someone had made a local cache of the internet ;-)

Of course I can't blame the hackday crew about the lightning (though I can grumble at the Alexandra Palace folk - I can't believe that the tallest building for miles around has not been hit more often). I was seriously annoyed at the networking though - if the Cocoon GT could get it working for 100+ developers on a shoestring budget for the last five years (with the occasional hiccup but nothing as bad as this), then I'd expect BT with all their resources to be able to get their act together and support 500 developers.

Perhaps the highlight of the evening was watching Doctor Who on the big screen with the sound pumped through the PA. Having everyone cheering and clapping through the episode certainly added to the atmosphere. But it wasn't enough to lift my spirits, so around midnight I decided to call it a day. I wasn't getting much useful done and I was feeling irritable and frustrated after the stupid network troubles. Rain I don't mind ... lightning I don't mind ... just don't take away my internet! So like quite a few others, I hopped in the car and headed home, leaving perhaps a couple of hundred hardened souls to battle on through the night.

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