Blogs

The next Nitobi Hack Day has been scheduled for May 24 - put it in your calendar.

Check the details at Upcoming or on the Wiki.

Last time was wicked awesome and by awesome I mean totally sweet. Lots of hacking got done and the beer was cold.

And if you missed it last time we also have another Ajax and Scotch event the thursday before so that people can plan their exploits.

The turnout for Nitobi Hack Day was great!

Pretty much all the desks had people hacking and there were five of us around the boardroom table writing code. Hopefully everyone will update the wiki with their names and projects. There was a collaborative flex app, a Rails web application, a blog API written in merb, a Facebook app, foosball cup holders, an iPhone app, declarative YUI components, a command line twitter client, and a few others that my hangover is preventing me from recalling. Hopefully people will update the wiki with the full list.

Ryan had the best hack that was an Adobe AIR application that controlled music being played on a different computer - way cool and hopefully he will polish it up and release it for everyone! For his efforts Ryan won a copy of Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection!

There is still lots of beer left at the office so I am sure that this will be a productive week coming up.

Thanks to everyone who participated and hopefully we will have another hack day in a couple of months.

• Beer - CHECK (Storm Scottish Ale, one of the best Vancity microbrews)
• Food - CHECK (giant sammiches from Social here in Gastown)
• Free swag - CHECK (Thanks Mike and Adobe for the box of Flex Builder licenses and books)

Oh yah and I have finally made a wiki for the Hack Day so that people can put up ideas / list if they are coming or not.

Wed Feb 6 - Ajax and Beer 2.0 - come get drunk and display your superhuman programming abilities.

Sat Feb 9 - Nitobi Hack Day - come get drunk and display your superhuman programming abilities. Hopefully all the Nitobians will be there and then some so we are expecting about 25 or 30.

We now return to your regular programming.

The second Nitobi Hack Day will be happening on Feb 9, 2008 from 10am to 6pm. You can come and start hacking at 9 things will officially start at 10am SHARP! Of course you can always come by later and if you don’t know anyone just ask for someone that works at Nitobi to show you the ropes. You can signup over at Upcoming.

The event is meant to bring hackers from around Vancouver to the Nitobi office and dedicate a day to building something amazing! That something can be hardware, software or whatever. The hacking is generally focused on Ajax (of course), social networking (Facebook apps anyone?), wireless (Joe and I got this covered), AIR / Flex, and web development in general - of course the hacking can still be robotics, Wii hacks or whatever you think is cool.

Nitobi will provide the foosball, beer, prizes (like books, shirts, software and an IPod Nano) and you provide the hax0r skillz.

Be there!

Brian has just informed me that there will be a second Ajax and Beer meetup at the Shebeen room!

So be there on Feb 6 (Wed) for some beer titillating Ajax conversation.

That reminds me … we have to do Nitobi Hack Day 2.0 as well …

That is the name of the application that Jake, Chris and I made for the inaugural Nitobi Hack Day last Saturday.

Yes, we may have had the biggest team and yes some teams didn’t even stick around until the sweet, sweet beer but we came within a whisker of winning it all! Of course, how you split up a single iPod Nano amongst three people is anyone’s guess.

The idea behind the application was that we wanted a desktop app that would be running all the time and would bring in information from many different sources about music artists / bands that you like. In particular, I never know when new albums come out from bands that I like. The trick is that we use, in this case, your top tracks XML listing from Last.fm to determine what you like - ie what you listen to most is what you like. Then we use that info to look up different information about the bands. At the time of building the application we decided on two things to bring in; new releases and events. The original reason that we went with the AIR application was because I wanted to use my iTunes XML file. We found a problem with that early on - my iTunes XML files is >7MB and AIR has a tough time opening it. That is when we decided to go with Last.fm.

I will release the app shortly once I get some time to fix it up.

We were able to deal with the new AIR security model pretty easily and of course chromeless windows and all the great CSS3 support was much appreciated!

Nitobi Hack Day today was a great success! We had over 35 people in total throughout the day and ended up with about 8 or 10 presentations at the end of the day. Joe Bowser of Nitobi ended up being voted the coolest hack and won himself an shiny new iPod Nano. There was streaming video for most of the day and there will be videos put up on YouTube soon. Tweets can be seen from Andre, Brian, Roland and myself.

At the end of the day the keg of beer was tapped and there was a flury of activity as people tried to put the finishing touches on their applications.

Thanks to everyone who came out and made this event a very fun time! We will definitely be doing it again soon!

I will report on my Adobe AIR hack tomorrow once I get some much needed rest

Tomorrow is the day - first ever Nitobi Hack Day!

The details are now all set. Starting at 9am or whenever people can drag their asses out of bed, programmers and designers from around Metro Vancouver are gathering at the Nitobi world headquarters in Gastown for a day of hacking. After building some cool soft or hardware (and playing xbox / wii) we are going to gather at 5 to have some beer (a keg of local R&B Red Devil Pale Ale micro-brew) and pizza while people present their hack results. The favourite hacker will receive some sort of Apple hardware I believe and there are also some O’Reilly books + shirts to be given away.

A little birdie told me that their will be some iTunes AIR apps being built, some Wii controller robot hacking, and some free wireless hacking. You will have to stay tuned to hear about all the cool concoctions and there may even be a live video stream of the event over on ustream. Of course there will also be live tweets from at least myself, Andre and Brian.

After we will be retiring to one of the many great local pubs for a drink or two.

Hope to see you there!

Ok so we have some news. The nice folks over at O’Reilly have contributed some swag for people that attend hack day - this will most likely be given away as prizes. We are also trying to swing some more free stuff in the way of software and hopefully Andre will contribute some hardware for the best hack day app! We have also almost secured a keg of beer for those thirsty hackers and I will try my best to prevent it from being tapped until sometime in the afternoon just to keep the coding quality up to par

Just to be sure the day is Sat Oct 20 from 9am till whenever - we will likely go out for some drinks afterwards in Gastown and maybe even beyond.

Let us know you are coming (on facebook or upcoming) so that we reserve a spot for you in case there is no room on the day!

For those that don’t want to hack then at least come by to have a beer and say hi!