At the Fivium Christmas party this year I got given a Strandbeest kit in the Secret Santa. I thought this was excellent and had enough fun building it and playing with it that I figured it was good enough to make a quick post about before closing out the year. Below is a picture of the box I unwrapped (along with a kazoo, but that’s another story entirely) and it instantly made me want to go home and put it together. As a watcher of Tested videos I’d already seen Adam Savage put one of these kits together and it definitely looked like fun.

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Another year working for Fivium, another Fivium Hack Day.

The format of the Hack Day at Fivium is now fairly well settled so the organising was much as it was for previous years. Unfortunately this year I wasn’t working in the main office to do the bulk of the organisational work but thankfully there were other people more than willing to do the arduous work of sending out a couple of emails and seeing what prizes people might want.

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Last summer I wrote about 3D printing a replacement gear for a mechanical device in my office at Fivium. This topic came up recently while talking to one of the directors during the company’s 10th birthday party and I mentioned how it was a fairly simple thing to do, fun and how much I’d like to do it more yet the cost of paying a third party to print is a high barrier for personal projects.

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In my previous post I wrote about organising the Fivium Hack Day 2015, this post will be about how the event went, what people created and who ended up going home with prizes.

After all the organising we had around 15-20 staff taking part, which for a company of 40-50 isn’t bad considering not everyone in the company is a developer. Everyone taking part was a software developer or support tech, but as we started on a Friday at lunchtime we did get some idea discussion with some of the staff from other roles in the company such as software testers, marketing and company directors. Having the event start on the Friday afternoon gives a good chance for non-developers to take part where they can and to get a view of what the rest of us are doing which helps spread knowledge and encourage ideas.

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Some people may think that organising a hack day is just a matter of picking a date, sending an email invite and hoping the internet holds up but actually there’s quite a a lot of things to do if you want to make a hack day fun.

Back in February 2014 I organised the inaugural Fivium Hack Day, you can read about how the event turned out in my post Fivium Hack Day in April 2014. but I didn’t give too many details about the time & effort that went into organising the event.

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A couple of months ago something broke in my office. Typically in a modern office, especially at a software development company, when something breaks it is software with bugs. For a change it turned out to be a hardware failure, and not hardware like an SSD or their Air Con (which happens to frequently break) but a gear inside a large piece of archaic office machinery.

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As you can probably tell from this blog, I go to a fair amount of hack days and coding events in London. I like these events as it gives you a completely open playing field to work on pretty much any project you like and use any tools and languages you want. Unlike regular work where we have technical debt, paying customers and Gantt charts.

While talking to people in the office at Fivium, the company I work for, about these events sometimes people show an interest and come along, as Matt and Stephen did with Music Hack Day 2013. But not everyone has the time to spend an entire weekend coding away from home and families and not everyone wants to work on whatever the event theme is. Some people also worry about being the worst one at a hack day as they don’t know how their skills stack up against developers from all over London, the UK and the world.

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