Hackday on Wired

I just saw on Tom Morris's blog that Wired has a write-up on last week's Hack Day in London.

If you watch the video in the post about the lightening strike, you might see a few familiar faces from Brighton. :) The initial comment you overhear is yours truly branding the "stunt" (we initially thought it was a pre-planned show), "one of the dumbest ideas of 2007!" We later found out that the building had actually been struck by lightening and that the fire doors in the roof opened due to a malfunction.

A room-full of electronics and rain is not an ideal combination but, in retrospect, indoor rain is not something you get to experience often in life! :)

Also, if you want to see a picture of my bunny (and Mac, for that matter), take a look at the picture in the post that Jeremy took.

In case I failed to mention it, Hack Day was amazing! For a room full of people staring at their notebook computers, it was a very social event and yet didn't feel like a forced social event. If I had a couple of hundred million in venture capital and wanted to form a tech company, I'd follow the Hack Day model: Get a lot of intelligent, passionate developers together and then let them sort themselves out to build exciting new stuff and let the projects battle it out for survival. Very dynamic, very agile, very pragmatic, and very effective.

And I don't think I'm the only one who found the experience exhilarating. Here's how Jeremy tells it in his post, Hacked and Slain:

At the end of the long journey back to Brighton, I was chatting with an equally impressed Aral. We both loved BarCamp. We both loved Hackday. We both love living in Brighton. I mentioned San Francisco’s SuperHappyDevHouse. Maybe we can organise something like that to keep the spirit of Hackday alive.

Now that I've seen that the space works for hosting get-togethers after the success of Tuesday's FlashBrighton meet-up, I'm planning on organizing some SWX hack days at my place in Brighton. I'm not sure on the specifics yet but I'll announce the first one shortly.