Well done to all of the winners and all of the hackers, thank you to Samsung for the use of the lovely space, time for the pub. Assuming my fingers are still capable of gripping a glass.
See you all soon!
Last, but not least, best overall hack, this is a three way split, for England to win Euro 2020 again, the Guardian Recipes app again, and Fares’s Hey Guardian. Fares takes the prize.
Next, the best idea goes to Cloe for the Guardian recipes app!
Next up, most entertaining hack. Dom came second in that as well, it was pretty entertaining, but Leigh-Anne wins with her adding pizzazz to self assessments!
Next is greenest hack, and that’s for Calvin and Tom for England to win Euro 2020!
First, most futuristic hack goes to Dom with Guardian 2037.
Time for some winners!
The votes are in, they’ve been counted up and we’re ready to announce winners. Drum roll please...
Okay, that was the last hack, time for a short break before we crown some winners.
Apparently it’s reimagining it as a Star Wars opening crawl. Not sure that would go down well with all of our film review fans.
It could also offer a “no spoilers” switch and, a way of breaking down articles on a given film or exhibitions by ones best read before during or after the event. Nice idea, but purely conceptual, so don’t expect to see it soon.
Now (maybe finally?) we have Watchers and Exhibitionists, from Paul L which is a way to re-imagine our film and art journalism. As what exactly remains to be seen.
This is comparing the number of articles on a given topic from various sources in an easy to use bar chart.
Next is Lucy M H with a news search and graph tool. Lucy says “The aim is that you can search for a news topic (using newsapi) and quickly see which news organisations have given it the most coverage in a bar chart.” Please don’t ask me what newsapi is.
Phil fixed his laptop, then his presentation went straight over my head. Sorry Phil.
This is about a more sociable way of reading news, this means signing in to social media in the Guardian app, so you can share what you are reading with your friends and see what they are reading too.
In the meantime, we have Gustavo, Paula H, Ben W, Matthew R plan to engage Gen Z with What Your Friends are Reading.
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Or he would have done if his laptop hadn’t run out of batteries. He’ll try again in a moment.
Phil M has built a way to log you out of our web services automatically. Useful, and fiscally responsible.
Apparently the word “regularly” comes up a lot in performance review frameworks. This is a way of setting repeating tasks to ensure that those things that you are supposed to be doing regularly are actually being done regularly. And now he’s going to tidy his room, apparently.
Next is Habit Former from Jonny R. He describes this as “The ones that will help you get promoted!”
We’ve seen a few hacks around search, but these are user facing search boxes. We also have to search internally for stories, images etc. for articles. This should improve that process.
Next is Sam C with Search Everything, an internal search tool to search all the most detailed bits of information we know about our content.
This breaks articles down into individual sections which remembers progress and lets you break news down into easier to digest chunks.
Next is Chat Style News from Mohammad H which lets you read news like you do read messages in chat apps.
Bubbles is a feature in the latest version of Android which allows us to add a little icon to access the app quickly and easily from anywhere on your phone.
And Clippy makes a cameo appearance at the end.
Next Max S with Bubbles and a question: “who doesn’t have fond memories of clippy?” Hmmm.
Our current address lookup tool is quite clunky, Rupert plans to make it sleek, modern and more easier to use for our users by using an API which allows immediate lookups in a dropdown menu when you start typing in your address.
Next is Rupert B with Address Search, offering better address lookups on our support pages.
This builds on the previous hack with steps and timers for when cooking.
Jamie W up next, with help from Cloe (again) and Alex B (also again). They have a hack for interactive recipe methods with timers.
This is an app entirely for searching the over 10,000(!) recipes we have by site, with a whole load of filters including by dietary requirements and budget, and a way to add ingredients to your shopping list.
Cloe takes the stage next with Guardian Recipes App. Another undescribed hack, maybe a bit less mysterious than Adam’s.
Adam is wearing a cape (not too surprising if you know Adam) and has come from the future.
This is another look at search on the Guardian. This time with added M People. Also not surprising for Adam.
Next Adam F with HIY, another hack with no description. Mysterious.
Fares has created a method to increase accessibility, particularly for blind and partially-sighted people, which will allow people to speak to the Guardian and have the Guardian read articles.
Fares next with Hey Guardian - News for all, not the many. This is described as a very simple app that tries to deliver news with a more human tone and touch to visually impaired people. Using cloud technologies to synthesise news with a neural voice and conversational UX.
Rob P is claiming that he will make tag pages great again (MTPGA?). This will add extra information into our tags to make provide greater context, it’s not just the tagged articles, but it also looks at how these stories were promoted.
Next is Guardian Tagliatelle from Rob P and Chris M which seems to not have a description, or I’ve deleted it from my spreadsheet.
This means that Siri can suggest podcasts to you, and Aoife says that Apple won’t be tracking you when you do so.
Next is Aoife with Siri Suggests Guardian Podcasts.
This creates a world map with recent articles highlighted by country. It looks extremely slick.
Next Niko and Antonio with Mapping the news: A prettier climate tag page. A way to geolocate climate change stories and put them on an interactive map for readers to explore.
Next is That one weird trick in the Guardian app from Dana (and bump), described as preview articles, save, and share, using this one weird trick.
We do currently use Google search on our site, could we offer some alternatives? Paul seems to think so. Although Twitter search seems like it could be opening a can of worms.
Next is Paul B with Searching The Guardian, an alternative set of search boxes for people who don’t want to use Google.
This is about making visualisations of web calls from the Guardian website and making them look really quite lovely, like cartoon fireworks. I’ll have to try and get some images at some point to share.
Jessica N next with website calls as artwork, which poses the question “what do our, and competitor, webpage calls look like as artwork?”
This adds a non-scrollable element to the top of our live blogs which we can add useful information into.
Next up, Pinhead by Alex B, a concept for pinning live video & data to the top of a live blog. Hey, that could have saved me a lot of work.
This would be a way to deliver our lovely Long Reads directly to your Kindle. Don’t know our Long Reads? You should.
Next we have the solution to the murder mystery from yesterday in the form of KYLLR from Simone, Vanessa, and Paul R, which actually stands for Kindle Your Love for the Long Read.
This is a text learning system which may or may not help us write self-assessments. I’m leaning towards “may not” based on the examples being shown.
Next up, Leigh-Anne M, with a way to add pizzazz to your self assessment. The description for this, and I quote: “Pour the wine into the sauce, but even Quorn would work, albeit with less in the Guardian codebase whenever possible, and making improvements, sure, but not against what was covered, or the Scala school doc for concepts 4 and 5.”
This is a way of getting help articles which will appear instead of our current FAQs. Apparently people need help with Confit Potatoes.
Yusuf F next with Help, a reimagining of The Guardian’s help pages.
This adds a popover at the bottom of the app which allows you to continue listening to podcasts while browsing other articles. Looks slick.
Ana P next with a method for integrating a podcast player into the Guardian Live app.
It’s all gone a bit cyberpunk and post-apocalyptic in here.
A physical hack around a device that filters the air in cities, and non-Guardian content from your mind. I don’t know how much of this is currently working...
Next up, Dominic K with the Guardian 2037 - Filter Bubble which will apparently keep Guardian users alive in the bleak dystopian future.
This doesn’t only filter by London. There’s Leeds and Edinburgh too. Possibly needs a little more refinement.
Restaurant reviews by location by Colin K next. You might be shocked to hear that this a hack involving filtering our restaurant reviews by geographical location.
You type in keywords and it creates a slightly nonsensical comment based around that. There is a chance that it could be improved with further training on comments, there is also a chance it won’t.
Next is Mahesh M with a hack he calls Discussion is Dead, a Guardian discussion comment generator using GPT-2 text generation model.
This is a tool for finding you people to go and have coffee with in order to get to meet people outside of your team. Also, Josh potentially has a future as a salesperson.
Next up is a hack called Matcha from Josh R-B, Stephen G, Jenny G-J and Reetta V, this is about connecting people who want to meet people. Matcha is a chatbot (for the future!) [the future being one of our themes] that will introduce you to colleagues you’ve never met before, in the Digital department and beyond.
This is definitely one of those hacks that looks like it will be super-useful for our other developers, but which to me might as well be written in Greek. Still, did you see our article on the making of Eye of the Tiger? That was good.
Next we have Alex W with a hack called Rocky which will save our devs from writing cloudformation or doing anything by hand ever again (do they anything by hand as it is?).
This is Antonio’s last ever hack day (sniff), and he’s decided to leave us by dealing with an issue that has been sitting in the iOS backlog for quite some time. If we can get this into the app, it will make a lot of our iOS app users very happy indeed. What a way to sign-off.
Antonio up next with GLA-1227, a way to allow users of the iOS app to choose which browser to use to open articles and external links.
Rhys opens his presentation with “I’m not a dev”, then proceeds to show off a very slick looking Chrome extension. Maybe time for a career change?
Rhys (with a lot of unnamed help) has created a Chrome extension that displays the top Guardian stories at the time
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This is a Trello-based hack to allow us to easily recall things that have been posted to Trello over the past 6 months to help us fill in self-assessments.
The live demo is taking a bit longer than I think Jerome was expecting. Rasha gave him a few extra seconds. She’s far too generous.
Next Jerome with Rearview about which all he’ll say is “you will thank me in 6 months”
They have visualised the carbon cost for flights for the Euro 2020 tournament.
Call me suspicious, but I suspect that this the environmental impact of this is only part of the motivation behind this hack.
Next we have England to win Euro 2020 - best for the environment from Tom R and Calvin D. They say that Euro2020 is being held across Europe+ rather than a single host country, so James Dart’s (Sports Editor) hypothesis is that this will be the worst Football Tournament for the environment. We have visualised all flights for the group stages of Euro 2020 and the estimated (best/worst case) carbon emissions.
We seem to be loading some of our fonts twice on our web pages, this can be an extra 25kb each time, they have built a way to host fonts to save you using extra data.
First up is Font Woffle by Jamie B and Simon A, which is described as a way to consolidate font hosting and loading across web products.
Rob P is up making introductions to the presentations.
Andrew takes over the blog
Andrew here, taking over from Rasha so she can keep an eye on the timings while people present. Expect far less well-constructed blog posts over the next hour or two as I do my best to watch and type and think of jokes all at once.
Dana comes over to sit across from me. There is silence for a few minutes.
Suddenly there is a furious (and I mean tablequake 7.1 magnitude at least) keyboard tapping and the following distressed words:
OH MY GOD my tab key is stuck!!!!
and
PLEASE STOP!!!
For about 3 minutes. Please note the capitalisation here is vital.
Time to start testing the hacks out for the presentations. T-minus 1 hour and 27 minutes!
PHHHWWWWOOOAAAAAR that’s some screen though innit.
Just passed by Michael and had a quick check-in on his ‘stupid’ idea.
Oh it’s so bad. I haven’t even submitted it
It sounded horrendous to be fair. It could still go for ‘Most Entertaining’ Michael!
Help!
My computer has become sentient and has taken over the blog!
No not actually. James Cameron please stop calling.
Max has just asked me to make a post to help with his hack and said not to ask him why. Well I was happy to oblige. Shame though, the former did sound a bit more exciting.
Hello world
Ana is working on a podcast player for the articles with audio versions. I confess it did take her quite a few attempts at explanation before I got the gist of the problem she was trying to solve. Visual cues were definitely required.
Turns out when you start playing the article audio, when you move away from that article you have no control over the pause/play button. Absolute travesty! Who designed this? Just kidding but this certainly sounds like a good little problem to solve.
Go Ana!
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First stop Amina. She’s rewriting the Guardian in C which apparently I’m told is one of the oldest programming languages in the world. I asked what the oldest was but quickly realised it was very likely to devolve into a very philosophical debate regarding the very nature of programming so I stopped it right there.
A discussion for another time methinks.
So why do this?
Because I want to learn C.
Fair enough! It seemed to me a bit like learning Latin these days. Not incredibly practical but kinda sorta pretty cool.
Another beautiful day! Welcome to day 2! There will be much continued hacking until the presentations at 3pm.
Let’s see how many hackers we can pester in this short time-frame. Knowing me, probably quite a few.
Stay tuned!
*Pointing to the end of earth’s rotation around the sun*
*lamentation relating to my general fatigue*
*commenting regarding our continuation in approximately 17 hours*
*witty sign off*
“Jess, tell me everything.”
So I was born in 1991-” Too far Jess too far! Let’s try from this morning.
There’s about 2 minutes or so of dazzling and profound detailed exposition and I’m listening very intently. My brain hasn’t properly processed a thing.
Jess is making colourful bubble art of varying size and number on a computer.
That’s the story and I’m sticking to it. Now here’s Jess pointing and Zeek looking concerned.
Tom and Calvin are working on a Euro 2020 emissions ‘thingie’.
In short it will show the impact of the teams and fans travelling to the different countries for each game. It’s their belief that this should have longer term implications for any future large scale events (the olympics, music tours etc). Very good serious stuff.
With the data they accumulate they’re going to work out all the permutations which they said can lead to such headlines as “ England Winning Best for the Environment”.
I was amused but then realised that was a very specific headline. I asked how often England had won and the answer was never.
....
*suspicious squint*
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Quick prod of Colin next for his bright idea. He tells me very nonchalantly.
Get this, filtering out restaurant reviews by location on the Guardian website.
ARGH ! I LOVE IT! It’s a winner. Hack Day OVER!
No I’m not biased I just really really love food.
But actually why wasn’t this already a thing? It makes so much sense!
Paul has a conceptual hack.
He wants you to be able to have a before, during and after commentary experience with the films you love.
Alex, a most fabulous designer, is helping him achieve his vision. I’ve had a sneak peek but with a strict ‘no photography’ rule.
At least I can reveal Paul’s ‘ooaooaaffffff yeah’ (a noise not so easy to spell admittedly) indicates he’s happy with the progress.
As I’m prowling I spot two heads secretly hidden away from the rest of the crowd. Gareth and Nic are enjoying the partial quiet solitude until I make my grand entrance. Sorry!
They are working on rebuilding the commenting UI for the Guardian. A couple of very confident fellas who seem pretty passionate about comments. Or at least Nic does as he used to work tirelessly on the moderation tools. When I prodded Gareth for his reasons I got 3 solemn yet powerful words.
I like Nic
Flattery will get you everywhere Gareth. Unfortunately though this was shortly followed by his downfall.
Actually I couldn’t think of my own idea
That ought to have been heavily moderated before publication mate!
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We’re back!
I’ve just come across my first group who have somewhat gleefully announced they’re the killers!
I was instantly disturbed but before I could reach for my phone (because no way they were the musical virtuosos that birthed us Mr. Brightside - no offence guys) they were quick to spell it out for me.
Apparently it’s K-Y-L-L-R and I’m not allowed to know anything about it. I love a good murder mystery but I’m glad in this case it’s a little less of column A and a little more of column B.
Lunch break!
What’s that sound? Hello? Excuse me but no one mentioned there would be building works in the room today.
Oh no it’s just Dominic trying make a respirator for the future to save our precious Guardian readers from the plague.
How’s it going?
Nervous laughter.
Don’t know
Me:
Aha! Dana! My beacon in the dark. I’ve found her as tradition now demands. What’s the big idea then?
Small, easy and practical.
No she’s not just describing me, she’s working on a context menu to help preview articles and share them with more ease.
Nifty!
Moving on! I arrive at a table with 4 very studious looking hackers that are actually so well fashion coordinated they look to be just a few colours short of a rainbow.
Jerome is working on a Trello ‘power-up’. According to him it won’t be
...the greatest achievement in 2 days
I agreed.
No of course I didn’t! Come on Jerome have a little more faith in yourself!
Fares wants to learn how to use an AWS service that reads texts in a more human voice. He’s using his time to develop his knowledge and skills in order to - and I’d love to finish this sentence but Fares needs to clarify exactly what his end goal is in his head before he makes mine explode.
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I’ve overheard someone saying they have a stupid idea. I turn to find out who it was for I must know all. It’s Michael so I know this’ll be good.
He’s totally focused on Today in Focus, our daily podcast. Is it a captivating look at the headlines that lends the listener a deeper and more profound understanding of the news? Maybe but apparently that’s not enough for Michael. He’d love to give the listeners the opportunity to add a little musicality to their day.
The aim of the game, the listener plays a tune through their device and the hosts must sing it. He got a lot of grilling from me on how that would work exactly but really this timeless quote explained it all.
It’s shockingly easy to do really stupid audio things
Andrew just sat next to me. He’s not feeling particularly inspired. He reckon’s he’ll step outside. A bitterly hot coffee and a blast of arctic air might just shock him into inspiration. Or freeze him to the pavement.
Similarly, Zeek is also not off to great start. He’s come to me looking for the charging station. His laptop is dead.
A promising start to the day methinks!
Good morning Hackers!
What better way to start the new year than with a darned good idea, eh?
Today we’re at the beautiful #SamsungKX and it’s an equally beautiful day. Get your sunnies out there are no curtains covering that lovely view.
Join me, the resident village layman as I find out who’s changing the world. No pressure.
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