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The results
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
The hack with the most potential was won by Graham Tackley and Patrick Sterling
The overall hack winners was a joint project by Seb Cevey, Lindsey Dew, Ken Lim & Chris Pearson.
Thanks for joining us today and we look forward to seeing you next hack day
Updated
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
Updated
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
Updated
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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.
Updated
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
now for a science lesson from Wenjia pic.twitter.com/860EcVCkSn
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
Updated
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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.
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
And our survey says... pic.twitter.com/1XhdjeBuq4
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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.
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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.
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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.
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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).
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
Content API notifications next, kindly brought to you by Nicolas Long.
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
Updated
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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.
Updated
Gideon Goldberg up next to talk about Native Advertising.
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
Football robot pic.twitter.com/EWiJK4Rybu
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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.
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
Updated
Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent, Mario Andrade, Duncan Hammond have worked on a great new potential video representation for Guardian content. Very impressive.
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
Updated
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
Up next Jesus Gumiel with a Soulmates hack that uses bluetooth and qrcodes to look for potential partners.
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
Updated
Ok, so Rupert Bates, Tom Grinsted have got the Guardian onto Google Glass. No surprises there. Was blinking cool.
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
Updated
First quinoa gag of the day pic.twitter.com/pssVKi7Hom
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
The seats are filling...
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
First up is Rupert Bates, Tom Grinsted with a hack called "OK Guardian". Any guesses as to what this one is about?!?
About to start the presentations
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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
— Matthew O'Brien (@moschops_) January 17, 2014
Wow, @OliverJAsh doesn’t mess about! #ddhd
— Paul Lloyd (@paulrobertlloyd) January 17, 2014
#ddhd pic.twitter.com/AV7Rx4GA59
— Lee Simpson (@itsleesimpson) January 17, 2014
"Helping" with a hack: Guardian+Glass. Guardiass? Glassian? Grauniglass? #ddhd pic.twitter.com/GZJfcFEfRg
— Tom Grinsted (@TomGrinsted) January 17, 2014
The glass in action. Lookin' good @TomGrinsted :) pic.twitter.com/BCvX7vf132
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 17, 2014
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.
And we are back!
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.
Updated
Finally for today
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
Updated
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
— Matt Chadburn (@commuterjoy) January 16, 2014
May yet get ideas about Glass-enabled journalism (working name: The Journalator) together for #ddhd. #thoughtsOnGlass pic.twitter.com/7belHPvL3e
— Tom Grinsted (@TomGrinsted) January 16, 2014
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
— Tanya Cordrey (@tcordrey) January 16, 2014
*Best Attenborough voice* What we have found here is the very rare Swells in its native habitat. @steppenwells pic.twitter.com/Ea7Bk6lckH
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
Also essentials for any good hack day... Food and coffee
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 :)
— Shoreditch VH (@shoreditchvh) January 16, 2014
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
A hive of activity https://t.co/Jpnvm67O2S
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
Venue Shout-Out
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.
Updated
The view from the stage... pic.twitter.com/HC0glLV1eF
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
And the rest https://t.co/smmAIrwsyL
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
And more https://t.co/7La824PUtx
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
Still flowing https://t.co/SD4FVwyKMO
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
Ideas are flowing https://t.co/rlILxeREAE
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
There is a definite buzz in the room pic.twitter.com/eRhSFIrULu
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
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
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
@TomGrinsted talking about @googleglass pic.twitter.com/Qr0102bkQc
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
@philwills trying to inspire our devs with some new shiny web developments that might inspire them pic.twitter.com/g381AoHHea
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
@nicksatterly from our lovely Websys team pic.twitter.com/VDS15KnAMp
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
@sihil taking about more cool Websys systems to make our lives better. Phew they are moving fast! pic.twitter.com/Epy7sq4xEp
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
@theefer sharing some of our (my team's) brand spanking new products pic.twitter.com/fet3wvnBgE
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
Wendy Orr sharing about the very cool @GuardianWitness platform and how we could make use of it pic.twitter.com/h4cjsuACwU
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
@rtyley talking out our identity products pic.twitter.com/ouI7YtwvzK
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
Updated
@jenny_sivapalan sharing about the amazing content api pic.twitter.com/GgD2cLDDjA
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
Fantastic to have Andrew Miller join us and share his thoughts. pic.twitter.com/N2c19xWx6b
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
And we're off!
@mattpointblank is on stage and we are off! pic.twitter.com/9lTwGvbMyx
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
Matt Andrews is about to take the stage to kick this off officially
#ddhd on irc dot freenode dot net (/j ddhd)
— Kaelig (@kaelig) January 16, 2014
@kungpochicken settling himself in pic.twitter.com/GIE1NzxYFT
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
People are gathering. @theefer is present, it's going to be good pic.twitter.com/Xeg4fqpeeL
— Jonathan Hyde (@JonGuardian) January 16, 2014
Welcome
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.
Some of you may be wondering what a hack day is about. It isn't about Guardian developers trying to hack into anything. The Wikipedia entry for a "hackathon" gives a good overview of what a hack day is all about.
We will be gathering tweets, photos and updates from as many of the team as possible over the next two days. To follow our twitter updates we are tweeting under the hashtag #ddhd.
Lastly, this live blog will be written by non-journalists and offences to the Guardian style guide will likely abound.
Updated
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