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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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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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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Music Hack Day (MHD) is an international 24-hour event where programmers, designers and artists come together to conceptualize, build and demo the future of music. Software, hardware, mobile, web, instruments, art - anything goes as long as it’s music related. I have been before, as I’m sure you all remember from last years blog post

Transcribertron is the name of the software I worked on with a couple of Fivium colleagues for London Music Hack Day 2013. It’s software that takes listens to music that you play and transcribes the pitches and durations into MusicXML.

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Back in October 2013 I went to Battlehack along with 3 colleagues (Ben Basson, James Atkin and Aled Lewis) from Fivium. The hack day was initially advertised in early 2013 and when we signed up in March they hadn’t even figured out a venue. But the lure of a genuine metal battle axe and a possible $100,000 top prize was enough to make the early registration worth it.

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Hacked.io was a London based hack day I went to in July, along with 500 other developers, artists and general creative people.

The event was one of the biggest of its type that I’ve been to before. It was held at indigO2 in what was once the Millenium Dome. There wasn’t any general aim like other hack events I’ve been to, Music Hack Day / Accessibility Hack, instead it was more of a “Make whatever you like, as long as it’s cool” atmosphere.

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Music Hack Day (MHD) is an international 24-hour event where programmers, designers and artists come together to conceptualize, build and demo the future of music. Software, hardware, mobile, web, instruments, art - anything goes as long as it’s music related.

Barbertron is the name of the software I worked on with a friend for London Music Hack Day 2012. It’s software that takes in audio and (tries) to make it sound like a barbershop quartet.

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