Friday 13th November 2009 was Eden’s first hack day! Following on from the previous success of “Code something cool in 2 hours” we decided to devote a day to each doing whatever we wanted to do. It could be anything at all; the only requirement was that we had to demo something at the end of the day.
Tris and Richard did a multi-user dungeon game using Rails, Javascript and Juggernaut: The Fall. It was impressive and extensible. It was cool that it was already responding to multiple players by around about lunch time! They did a great job on the user interface.
Chris worked on an integration system between multiple contact lists. Big City. The demo example was between Highrise and Google Contacts. The synchronisation didn’t quite work, but we could see its potential.
Enrique and Steve made an ambitious framework for customers to put features into git with scenarios and steps. Gourd. It will link up with projects and iterations, storing the features safely until it is time for them to be automatically inserted into the filesystem for the appropriate iterations.
Todd spent the day learning how to make iPhone applications, and successfully followed a demo app known as “Whoops, i broke my iPhone!” which made us all laugh … at least 3 times! ;)
Spencer did a useful Sinatra app to help people send HTML-formatted emails. Easymail. I think the idea is to write an HTML template, and then use the tool to add in content. It handles inline CSS and multipart correctly without any fuss.
I (aimee) wrote my first Adobe Air application. Pomo. It is something like the OSX pomodoro application. Not having found a suitable Linux equivalent, i thought i’d write my own in Air to make it cross-platform.
I think we all had a great day, learnt a lot of new things, and enjoyed seeing what we’d all managed to produce at the end of the day. Which is your favourite idea? All these projects are open source, so if you’d like to help out, dive in!
