Update: If you met me at the hackathon, say hello in the comments. Or on Twitter, I’m olleolleolle. Kthxbye!

Jens describes his experience at his blog. Wired wrote an unrelated but explanatory What is a hackathon? piece, for your understanding pleasure.

This was the shape of the event:

• initial 30-second “who I am” introductions from each person in the room,
• then project pitches to recruit groups,
• then working on those projects,
• then working on those projects,
• and then one hour of demos on Sunday.

I presented myself and mentioned that I had forgot to bring my Arduinos. Turns out, that platform is as popular as its huge mindshare would suggest. I joined a team that already had an electronics gizmo (candy dispenser that you tweet to) and a software prototype running. Cheating? Perhaps. The ground rules need to be more clear on where teams start, I think. Example fix: “No pre-made teams. No pre-existing software.”

The work I did for the project was mostly software quality-related. Moved code, deleted code, renamed things, added a few tests. And I made a very small documentation website using Jekyll and the Twitter Bootstrap CSS. The project presented a how-to document, but not a fully described protocol. We sharpened the prototype.

When Sunday rolled around, and demo time at 17:00 was nearing, our project instigator opened a bottle of champagne, and took some pictures. Psyching other teams? There was a schedule change, and suddenly we could lounge until 18:00, the new demo start time.

It went well: we shared the second place with Jens’ group. The winner was a quite useful project, but it does not yet have any useful web presence.

Cheer: Highlights of the weekend

Met great locals. People were open to talking, and were helpful.

Met great people who were not like me. Graying men in business casual. Generation gap can be a challenge, but this event had no “cost of contact”.

The event had a kid-friendly atmosphere. Kids playing Minecraft, controlling a blimp, et cetera. Participating instead of irritating. Perhaps this explains best: “Dad, can you install the latest beta of the client for me?”

My team was very kind and cheerful, too. I was welcomed into a team of friends as a peer. Thanks.

The place and the logistics and the sponsors made the event feel very privileged. High-functioning.

Challenges: Stuff we need to do better

Here is a short list of stuff I know all new communities have to contend with. I want this to be a successful community, so I share my mild concerns here.

Shyness is real. Enabling shy people to interact on their own terms is hard. Try to think of that when designing a social event.

Avoid popularity contests. I would like your thoughts on how to avoid the popularity contest of choosing teams. Perhaps it is enough to describe the process of Recuiting A Team For Your Problem: “You will have to gather a team, and that’s no walk in the park. Here are the vital information you need to put out in your project pitch.” What do you think?

Don’t be a software ghetto. Actively pursue involvement by groups outside the “existing set of hackers we know”. The ghetto feeling can make the events irrelevant. Danish event Demodag is great at this.

Keep everyone in the loop. If there is a comment track, or a back-channel, make sure everyone knows about it to avoid risking missed opportunities. (I joined the #tbd2012 IRC channel, on freenode, just to see whether anyone else had. They hadn’t, so not a problem there.)

Continuity: I want more of this

I like this event, and I want this community to flourish. Sowing those seeds:

Personal prep: Keep a personal list of hackable problems and technologies, to remain prepared.

Technology radar (here one by ThoughtWorks) are personal, meaningful to a person or to a group, not to a whole culture. So, you tiny list, is useful to you.

On that note, I’m going to try and make one of those, using some mix of technologies I agree with. And, I am going to tell you about the 14th Demodag. Another day. Ciao!

We met. We hung out. And, walked through the *Dynamo paper*, which was released in 2007, and is quite self-contained. That makes it “a NoSQL classic”. Good paper with which to open a reading circle. Now we have some pre-understanding for upcoming papers.

Photo by kalavinka

Other content

Neo4J’s Peter Neubauer, riffed on on Google’s data hugeness, which led us further afield: Google / Big Data; Crowdsourcing — WordNet; Concept: Discard 99% of the data, using the top 1%.

Thoughts on format

We’re currently toying with new/different perspectives/formats:

• “Developer Perspective”
• “Infrastructure/Scaling Perspective”
• “Arch. Perspective”
• “Apps/Ops Perspective”

Polyglot cases: How do you work with several multi-database setups?

Event bus usage: Some people use NoSQL stuff for the event buses. What are pros and cons here?

Do you need anything else there? I really enjoy this peek behind the scenes, implementation problems, etc. It is not something I can bring directly to my workplace and use, but I like the challenge of understanding large concepts together. The current format suits me well.a

Some hints and tips I picked up:

Google’s research end-of-level boss Peter Norvig’s talk at Berkeley (YouTube you-feel-lucky) — summarizing all the fields of research. (His official title is Director of Search Quality.)

A question: Is Stepanov’s Elements of Programming any good? Is it for me? (C++, math, beautiful type-setting.)

Next paper?

Google’s Bigtable? Cassandra? I cheated, and begun reading the Cassandra one. Let’s see how that goes.

dojo.beer("Copenhagen");

As you may know, RFID is a technology used in transportation cards sucha as the new Skånetrafiken “Jojo”, Stockholm Länstrafik’s “Access”, and the London Underground “Oystercard”, as well as Öresundsbron bridge “BroBizz”, and multiple other places. These cards operate without any internal battery/power source but are powered from the radio signals sent to it from the “reader”.

Wikipedia on RFID

Please come from 18:30 to 22:00. This event is all free. Holler to me if you need instructions on getting there.

Had a long walk over the harbor area of Malmö, explaining it to Tilmann.

We saw:

• Mai tai, of which we know nothing. A ship bar/restaurant.
• a skatepark, with a rock band (5 guitars, 1 bass, 1 drummer), and a set of Rock Band players, and two sets of Super Street Fighter (on XBox 360)
• boulder problems being worked on by rock climbers. “Problems” is what they call it. Each with a level of difficulty. Made me think of Jan Kogut, Polish rock-climber-hacker-wild-man

Also, lots of buildings.

Til’s car had a soundsystem which put them all – yeah all – to shame. Then he took off, heading south. Happy trails, T.

The Hu-Ha-Hu man’s choir will be in there. This will be so great.

It also featured Mark saying “I’m finished with this project!”, again. A Bluetooth scanner project, which was using Rhino to wrap Java APIs, again.

There were some new faces, and lots of electronics know-how in the house. I learnt a ton from Micke, who show-cased his company’s home automation product: a dimmer for your lights. And also an RFID reader which was autonomous; it had its own network cable and all. It’s out was sending xPL messages to the network, like “if you, the automated lamp, is off, turn on, if not, do nothing”. (Cave: My loose interpretation of this might be off.)

I continued my investigations into the Arduino kit I bought at Reboot. The thermistor and the photoresistor got some exercise, and the piezo was used to play sounds, and soon after that we found a piece of software that Clay Shirky had been in on making, which allowed us to write sheet music notes with a duration. Thus armed, we set out on a chase after the Mario tune. I wanted the sounds when we enters the caves, but David found the better song: the Bubble Bobble theme. Looking at sheet music, coding notes, took a while. But it played. I have a rotten video about it here.

Morgan took pictures with a real camera, and I guess he’ll link to them sometime.

PS: I was in a co-worker’s dream last night “You were talking in Italian with a Spaniard.” The dream had vampires in it, too.

Do you have a microcontroller project? Or are interested in one?

We’ll meet at Hypergene’s offices (Västergatan 23) at 19:00 hours, this Tuesday, August 5. See you there!

I’ve brought my Arduino kit with me.

Mark ran a talk about Typography on the Web for an audience of three.

For the hardware experimentation session, Carl had left, so it was Mark, me, and David, and we all worked on the same project. Mark had brought a USB-connected RFID reader of the Phidgets brand, and the idea: Use Rhino to wrap the Phidgets Java API to the RFID reader in a JavaScript, so we could… script the thing.

Update: Physical.js is the software we wrote, now published under MIT license.

We printed out the Javadocs for the API, and began laughing at some of the names: getLEDOn(), getAntennaOn(). Then we whiteboard-sessioned up some simpler, JS-idiomatic names, and had our wishlist. Almost cheating: Rhino has __defineGetter__ and __defineSetter__. Then we scrambled to find out how Rhino’s Java-adapting mechanism really worked. Great fun! Mark was the only one with the Phidgets hardware and software platform installed, so he was typing what me and David sent to him.

Prototyping with Rhino is quick. Soon, we were able to read the RFID card that Mark brought, and also a keychain fob I had with me. When we had 30 minutes until the trains went, Mark said: Let’s also hook it up to chat Jabber! He installed an OpenFire XMPP server on his machine, created a “rfid” account, and had it send a message onTagEnter and onTagLeave (enter/leave sounds better than gain/loss: we’re web developers…). Then he took an extra step and made chat commands to enable/disable the LED and antenna.

We cheered. We’d done it all.

Conclusion: Working on the same project is very productive. This was the first time we had a theme, two speakers, a dropped talk, and gotten stuff Done and Ready and the end of the night. Also: snacks. Healthier snacks are better, so next time, let’s up the ante.

This coming Tuesday night, July 22 we’ll deal with Javascript. It’s thus a theme. And, no less than two people asked to make presentations:

Morgan Roderick (from Gazebo) explains Event Delegates

Mark Wubben (sIFR lead developer) will do a short version of “Bringing Typography to the Web with sIFR 3”

Location: Västergatan 23, Malmö, that is Hypergene’s offices (ring its door-bell). From 19.00 onwards.