Peer Pressure

#openhackday

I went to Yahoo’s Open Hack Day London yesterday. Forthwith my observations:

• I went with Indy döt Net. We had some misconceptions about the event which may have informed our experience. Back before folk like DHH brought about the sexy extroverted geek, oldsters like myself thought of hackathons as small gatherings with lots of caffeine, pizza, a goal or two or three and lots of bandwidth.
• Yahoo put on a great show. The space was large. The food was good. There were some interesting presentations. There was plenty of caffeine. There was some late night pizza. But it was, in some sense, a show (there was a band, they were fun). This is perfectly appropriate on Yahoo’s part. They’re trying to get people involved in their (by the way, very good) APIs, tools, info.
• The bandwidth was not great. The usual WiFi problems: routers not giving out DHCP leases, people getting dropped off the ends of NAT tables, pipes being saturated. It seems like this ought to be a solved problem. My guess is that it goes something like this: The owner or supplier of the event space has a definition of robust network with phat pipe that is several orders of magnitude below that of the customer. Or at least I hope it is something like that. In any case, the Yahoo people worked valiantly all day long to get things working in an acceptable fashion.
• Having bad network for the start of the event was a real buzzkill, especially when the stuff being shown off were tools for accessing information on the open web (YQL is cool!). I was planning to make something with YUI but since I couldn’t download the code, I used jQuery instead because I had that library on my local disk already.
• FND discovered a big performance bug in TiddyWeb so we fixed it and released a new version. We might not have found the problem if it weren’t for the slow network.
• Ingy and I left without staying overnight because the vibe was large and big and loud.
• Tweets from the event point out that at least some people felt spectacularly productive in the time they were there. I certainly got a lot done, once I settled in. It suggests that there’s something wrong with the way we, as a society, do work. These days more and more people have the job of “knowing stuff”. Some days you’re just stupid, for whatever reason. Probably shouldn’t work on that day. Other days you’re smart. Then might be a good time to work. However this might also just be a romantic belief that supports my own predilections.

Anyway, it was a good time. Glad I was there.