And that’s it, thank you all for reading, we are going to the pub to drink beer out of cups and penguins. See you all next time!
Finally, best overall hack is unsurprisingly Thomas with his augmented reality for the paper.
We have a tie for best Conceptual Hack:
Jess and Paul B: gift subscriptions and Zeek with his audio transcription.
Most entertaining hack: Roberto getting us all to sing I Want It That Way.
And the winners are:
Most ambitious failure: Akash’s dark mode for tools!
I should also mention the admirable MCing from Rob P who has kept us all entertained during this. Also, big thanks to Rasha who didn’t just write this blog, but was also instrumental in getting this hack day organised.
And it’s time for voting. As a reminder, we have four prizes to win:
Best overall hack
Best conceptual hack (doesn’t actually work, but is a great idea)
Most entertaining hack
Most ambitious failure
Our final hack is from Zeek who has been looking at automating podcast transcription to make the content of our podcasts searchable on the site.
Our next hack is from Phil M and Vanessa who are looking at making our Open Platform content API more accessible to non-programmers.
If you don’t know the Open Platform API, it’s worth a look.
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John D and Leigh-Anne have been looking at ways to make giving personal feedback quicker and easier via a chat bot.
Tom R (and User Support’s own Fergus K who is sadly off sick today) is here to present a hack which involves projecting salient stats onto public buildings. Who wants to see tax avoidance figures, updating in real time, projected onto HMRC?
Jonny R now who is looking at one of his earlier hacks which was a Bechdel test for our site to see how skewed our news is towards men over women. A bit more work has been done to try and get this into production on the site.
Akash is back again with two hacks in a row.
The first is looking at The Grid, our image management tool. He wants to make searching through images quicker and easier using keyboard shortcuts.
His second hack is called ‘how I failed at hackday 2018 aka dark mode’ which was an attempt to add darker backgrounds to Composer (the word processor that I am typing this on).
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Jamie W now, can we make our election result trackers (which are currently bespoke) reusable across the site?
Tom F from the moderation team talking about why we might want to follow commentators (see 14:25).
Next we have Mariot C AKA Monsieur le Directeur who has also been looking at Ophan. He is looking at ways of understanding where ‘web view’ page views are coming from. We can now identify traffic from the Reddit app.
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We are back and Mario G has a wholesome Guardian page 3 inspired by this cartoon:
We’re taking a short break from the presentations now but will be back soon.
Dana is looking at Siri suggestions on the iPhone and how they can be used within the Guardian app.
And now we’re being lead in a song of I Want It That Way. Not quite what anyone was expecting at the start of this. Thanks Roberto.
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Roberto takes the stage. He was attempting audio fingerprinting, but it has gone wrong, so he’s telling us how.
Max with a hack called tracksuite. He’s been using something called kotlin/native and I’ll be honest, most of the rest of this is going over my head. There’s definitely some code on the screen.
Paul R next, he has been working on Ophan, our tool for understanding how people engage with our articles which will provide heatmaps to show how people interact with our fronts.
Jess and Paul B up next who have been looking at ways to buy subscriptions as gifts.
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Jamie next, he has learnt javascript in order to build a tool to create timings for roasting a dinner. They aren’t strictly running in chronological order, but still.
Alex W up now, he has been looking at testing whether or not people do spend more people looking at our immersive articles than they do a non-immersive version. It seems they do, by almost a third.
Guy and Lauren up now, they have built a multiplayer, browser-based Guardian Top Trumps using people from the news.
Next is Thomas B, he has a Harry Potter-inspired app which uses augmented reality to bring videos to the printed newspapers.
Oohs from the room when it is demoed.
Next are Jon H and Richard, they have been working on a way to speed up the process of getting a photo from a journalist’s phone into an article on the site.
Gareth next, he has been building an app which tracks news site headlines over time and compares differences.
Regis is up, he has created a CSS Zen Garden in order to help teach children how to build front pages.
Next is Jerome with a system that tries to suggest tags for the end of an article based on the text itself.
Next are Tom Fox, Vanessa Badino, Kim Yen Nguyen, Francesca Hammond, Zayd Ali who are looking at possible ways of following commentators and seeing where people are commenting.
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Next is Jon N, he is looking at how many comments btl are from people disagreeing with the articles. Not many, obviously. Ahem.
Next we have half the digital department (well, Tom, Adam, Katherine, Jessie, Akash, Rich, Phil and Calvin anyway). This is making it much easier to block adverts on specific content types if we want to keep them away from sensitive topics.
Rumours of a Sharknado in Croydon are currently unsubstantiated.
Simon up next, with an accessibility-themed hack. He’s looking at improving the contrast of the tab-focus on website elements for keyboard users as well as adding some additional key commands.
Colin is back up with a second hack, introduced as a ‘really boring hack’. It’s a Guardian pension contribution calculator.
Next up is Michael again, this time presenting his own hack, he’s decided to try and cross Puyo Puyo Tetris with creating the news. Unfortunately, it has failed. We’ve got some nice blocks randomly flashing across the screen in front of us.
Next up are Colin and Akash who have made a much more reliable way to add help and support messaging at the end of articles dealing with sensitive subjects.
We are off! First hack is from Laura but is being presented by Michael as Laura is off sick.
Laura has prettified one of our internal tools and added a ‘save dramatically’ button which sets off a whole launch sequence.
Our presentations are starting in 20 minutes, I’m jumping in to help Rasha with the blogging.
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That’s it! It’s over!
All hackers should have submitted their work at this point.
Presentations will be at 2pm.
Good luck one and all!
And now for something completely different.
Literally.
I’ve caught sight of Dana who’s informed me she’s abandoned her audio notification idea. No Particular reason. She just didn’t really like it, didn’t find it interesting and kinda got bored with the whole thing.
So what now?
Still on the audio theme, she is working on the Guardian podcast. She wants to make sure that anyone who listens to the podcast regularly (and why wouldn’t you?) can get slightly easier access to the app anytime. She wants it to appear in the Siri Suggestions like so:
And maybe, just maybe....one day, also allow a user to ask Siri to play the podcast.
And then...it would.
*inspired gasps and roaring applause, maybe some tears*
Quick update from the team that may or may not be bringing you Guardian Weekly gifts.
Or just Antonio because they’ve all scattered and he’s the only one I can spot. He was specifically working on getting the purchase to work on the app.
It kinda works....It works as well as can be expected....And I’ll leave it at that I think.
And so we did.
Maybe I’ll have better luck with Jamie. I heard on the grapevine that he’s working on something quite delicious. Is it true?
Yes it is! Jamie is working on a way to allow auto-calculation of timings when cooking a roast dinner. Yes you heard right! What?! So have you finally found the solution to roasting the perfect Turkey this Christmas I hear you exclaim? No, sorry, it’s beef only at the moment. Plus the potatoes and the Yorkshire puddings, all from scratch.
What about the veges? I asked curiously.
Apparently in Jamie’s house they go in with the beef.
...to make them taste less like veges and more like beef
Well it makes sense I suppose.
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My first victim is Alex who was happy to chat to me about his hack but was somewhat concerned about potentially ‘spoiling the surprise’.
Colour me incredibly intrigued!
Whilst I assured him I would make every effort not do so in my post, 2 minutes later it looks like there is no need to worry.
So it’s supposed to...hang on...huh....hmmmm...it’s not doing it....why isn’t it doing it?!....
Sounds like your hack will remain unspoiled Alex!
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Day 2 of Hack Day commences!
We are back at Guardian HQ and all hackers have 2 hours to furiously work on their ideas before it’s time to prepare for presentations.
Let’s see who I can find...
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Aaaaand hacks all for today folks!
Apologies for all the hackers I missed out on questioning today. There are just too many of you beautiful minds here today for one lowly person to document.
Tune in tomorrow at 10am GMT for the 2nd and final part of Hack Day November 2018.
Digibots roll out!
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Remember team Sensitive and Sexy?
Well they’ve gone through a re-branding and are now going by (β)AD BLOX.
Yes maybe it makes more sense and maybe it’s a little less controversial but I can’t help feeling a heavy sadness in my heart at the news.
On the bright side they’ve used up a bit more of the whiteboard, so of course, that automatically means they must be getting somewhere at least:
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Quick detour back to Jérôme. I can hear his cursing from across the room. Sadly not in French though.
Apparently an article on Nichola Sturgeon and Brexit currently brings up the following automatically suggested tags:
From the sound of Jérôme’s loud huffs of displeasure, I think he disagrees with at least 2 of them, and at most, 3.
On another note, we apparently used the word ‘Fluffiness’ 3 times in articles over the last year.
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Last year Phil courageously worked on the innovation that was the ‘Next’ button. This has since gone live on the website and completely revolutionised the browsing of Guardian cartoons. I dread to imagine where we would be now without him. The phrase ‘complete and utter breakdown of society as we know it’ comes to mind.
This time he’s focusing on ‘Searching’. A while ago his colleague Nic created the following website, which is ‘very beautiful’, that allows anyone to search for Guardian content using useful fields.
https://open-platform.theguardian.com/explore/
It was made mainly for developers in mind though which means it’s not easy for simple folk, like me, to make much sense of it ( I really tried). Phil is hoping to change all that soon.
Nic, who has suspiciously taken up position next to Phil appears to be monitoring his progress under the guise of support. Upon closer cross examination, however, the truth comes out.
I’m concerned you’re going to make it worse…
Shots fired!
Next stop, another booth. I see Dana! She was the lone wolf last time but I see now she is surrounded by 3 other fellow Guardian-ians! Has she finally found a pack?!
No.
Dana is working on audio/text to speech again. This time she wants to have the entire content of an article read out, sped up significantly and played as the notification sound when the article is published.
My first question is instinctive. Will it sound...pleasant?
Not necessarily
Well I certainly won’t be one to stifle our creative genius here.
One of her boothmates is Jordan. What is he bringing to the ‘table’? His first words were,
How to describe this?
Uh Oh, I sensed trouble and I was right. When he tried to explain his idea to me, the fuses in my brain immediately short-circuited and I very casually slumped to the floor. David kindly stepped in to prop me gently back up.
High level explanation - It’s an easier way to preview fronts and articles for android. Thank you David.
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Sorry, I left you a while, but a girl’s gotta eat.
Once upon a time in a ‘shed off to the side’ (not my words) there lived Antonio, Paul and Jess...
Priscilla is also on the team but apparently she’s slacking off somewhere having lunch. Tut.
They’re actually in a booth, not a shed, and they’re working on a Guardian Weekly gift hack! I like the sound of that. It should allow readers to purchase the Guardian Weekly on the website/mobile app as a Christmas gift for someone. Whoever they are they would obviously have to be very special. I mean should be so lucky. Santa if you’re listening...
Well not just Christmas! but any time...
Yes Jess but it’s December soon so why not keep it themed eh! Wink wink.
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As I penned the last post I happened to be sitting next to Jérôme so I just leaned right over and very queen-like started with “and what do yooou do?”
He’s another loner but that’s ok because he enjoys the solitude. He’s also working on tags.Team S&S better watch out!
‘Hopefully’ his end goal is to make a piece of software that gives untagged pieces of content suggested tags to save time thinking about tags because sometimes it’s hard to think about every possible tag and other times there’s not enough time to think about all the tags you could tag the content with. /deep breath
I see a black screen on his laptop with matrix-like numbers running. Morpheus hasn’t been in touch yet but otherwise things are going well so far. He’s managed to extract over 24 thousand articles from the content API, whatever that is, already.
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Heeeeeere’s Jonny!
Missing the axe but better equipped with an adorable pair of panda ear muffs.
He’s making it very clear to me that this is just an extension of a previous hack he’s worked on before. I insist that I (and you) want to hear about it anyway.
He wanted to analyse the amount of times men and women are generally mentioned in articles via a chrome extension. Today it’s all about collating the data and storing it.
But why?
Because if you look at the data most of the fronts talk about men more than women. Only 2 talk more about women than men and that’s the lifestyle section and fashion section. This is a good way to give visibility and data to editors to be aware of biases in their reporting.
Well I hope they pay attention!
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I spot a whiteboard in use and I am immediately drawn to it.
It’s Adam, Tom, Jessie, Catherine and Calvin. Team name ‘Sensitive and Sexy’ (Working title).
They are exploring the exciting world of the ‘Tag Manager’. Their goal is to create a section within the manager that allows you to block ads on individual tags and apply it to all/any articles.
Brilliant! Because at the moment it’s apparently a manual affair which is ‘like sooo last century’.
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Breaking News!
Barely half an hour in and the first hack of the day is already complete.
‘Get power to a table via an extension cord.’
Not as easy as it sounds people.
Another day, another hack!
Thank you to Amazon for welcoming us again into their bosom.
Looking forward to another opportunity to ‘do something useful hopefully’!
The general theme this round is ‘End of Austerity!....Not Quite Yet but Nearly...’ which sounds about right.
As everyone breaks up and puts their heads together, this layman once again gets ready to make the rounds and ask the tough questions.
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