Guardian Hacks SXSW: A retrospective

Last weekend I participated in the Guardian/Rewired State SXSW (or in hash tag form #gSxSW) hack day event.  I had a fantastic time, met some great developers and journalists, and was part of the team that came away with the prize for best hack.  Surely this is worthy of a blog post?

The event itself, run by the Guardian and Rewired State and sponsored by Google, offered a platinum ticket to SxSW as the main prize for the best overall developer and various other great prizes in a few different categories.

I had never been to a hack day before and was initially a little intimidated as I assumed that everyone there would be old hat at this.  As the day approached, it became clear that there would be developers and journalists attending from various different countries and parts of the UK and that the collective talent would be impressive.  The hype did not disappoint as there were teams from Spotify, LeMonde and Music Metric, as well as individual developers from all over the UK and Europe.  

Despite having arrived on my own, with no plan as to what I wanted to build, I quickly met two others in the same boat (Daniel Harper and Jason Grant) and we set about our task. We decided to build a content editor with a built-in social aggregator that journalists could use to collate research for articles automatically, and in real time. Jason had been thinking about the idea for some time before the event and had fleshed out wireframes and sketches which became invaluable as the project wore on.

The concept was simple. As a journalist typed into one pane of the app, the content would be analysed to determine relevant key words on which to base the search for social data. Tweets, images (Flickr to start with, though other APIs could be implemented later) and existing competitor articles would then be sourced that match the subject of the article. We called it... Articlr.

The whole thing was built using HTML and JavaScript on the front end with a Ruby back end. We made use of some of the latest HTML features and APIs such as contentEditable and drag and drop to make the UI slick and easy to use.

Of course we didn't get the whole thing built, but enough to demonstrate the idea, which seemed to be enough to please the judges. To be awarded the prize for best hack was a huge surprise, especially as I thought there were many entries that were technically more impressive than ours. 

A team from the French newspaper LeMonde had set about rebuilding an existing tool used by their journalists, in their own image – vastly improving on the original. The app used asynchronous JavaScript on the client side and on the server with node.js to allow real time sharing of information (BTW, check out their iPad app., it's very cool and free!)

Another team from @spotify stayed up all night on the Saturday, sleeping in shifts under their desks, to create an app that used eye tracking to analyse what the user was looking at on a web page and then play appropriate music. They didn't quite get it working, but the ambition and use of technology were very impressive.

In all, 87 developers managed to put together 27 hacks in less than 48 hours, and I'm sure many of them will go on to become real-world applications. Jemima Kiss of the guardian tech blog, who hosted the event, said she was blown away by the creativity and the amount that was achieved over the weekend. She wasn't the only one.

For a first hack day experience it proved far more interesting and enjoyable than I had imagined. It gave me the opportunity to meet, drink beer with and become friends with some truly interesting developers, journalists and entrepreneurs. Suffice to say many Twitter handles and business cards were exchanged. It also gave me a renewed confidence in my own development skills and I look forward to attending the next Rewired State hack day (National Hack the Government Day 2011) in March.

So here's to the Guardian and Rewired State who worked incredibly hard to put together a fantastic event.  I'm off to try and figure out what to do with our prize: a Rapman 3.1 3D printer from Bits from Bytes (suggestions in the comments please).