Finally the spirit of hack day award (an Amazon Echo) goes to Mateusz!
That’s all for today, time for a drink. If you’re interested, come back tomorrow for a few more screenshots and photos!
Most ambitious failure went to Antonio’s team - their hack to give app users more control over the notifications they receive was working 5 minutes before the presentation, but sadly crashed part the way through the demo.
Thomas’ vegetable-scanning app wins best hack award!
Winner of the ‘Avant Guardian In Perpetuity’ award is Max, with Guardian on Tap! His hack allowed people passing tube stations to swipe a guardian distribution point, and immediately get the days news downloaded onto their phone. Kinda like the evening standard, but, you know, cool and digital!
Mario Galic’s hack is a contribution to the play framework documentation. Lets hope it gets merged soon!
Voting begins...prizes this year are for ‘overall best hack’, ‘most ambitious failure’ and ‘Avant-Guardian In Perpetuity’. Here’s the trophies.
Excitingly, AWS (who kindly gave us a space to hack in yesterday) are also giving out some prizes...!
And finally! Michael Barton has blown us all away with his double hack. Phase 1 is a hack that changes the process of sshing into a specific box in our AWS accounts (currently a bash command to search for boxes, copy, write stuff, paste, hit enter process) into a single step, that even supports paging!
Phase 2, very related, took the guardian homepage and turned it into a techno rave. AMAZING!
Nathan from user help has been working on a hack that changes the guardian so that it not only reports on bad things happening, but provides ways people can possibly help improve the situation. Reading about homelessness? Donate to a charity that helps! Angry about a politician? Sign a petition!
Don’t just get angry, change the world!
The liberal bubble - are you in it? Susie suggests that with things like Brext and Trump outside, it might be safer to stay safely inside it.
Feeling sad about the state of the world? Susie’s hack will reassure you - instead of being faced with the horrors of twitter search results, the guardian bubble will reassure you with a picture of Jeremy Corbyn announcing that he was quitting twitter.
Please leave me in my bubble, it’s nice here!
Thomas has been experimenting with image recognition, enabling readers to find guardian content related to the physical world around them. Wondering what to cook with the ingredients in your fridge? Just point your phone camera at them and Thomas’s hack will find you the perfect guardian recipe to match.
Paul and Iona have been thinking about readers who want to support the guardian but find the £5/month minimum monthly contribution too much. With their hack, those who are unwaged or students will be able to give a reduced contribution to the guardian or buy a digital subscription at a reduced rate
Regis has been hacking on Ophan, the guardian’s tool for learning about how readers are viewing our content, making it much easier for users to work out where the traffic for a particular piece is coming from.
Adam Fisher presents ‘I’ve got the keyboard, I’ve got the secret’ (or ‘mice are evil’) - enabling mouse fearing users to navigate the guardian using their keyboard. It’s an accessibility revolution! Never mind that only 25-50% of page views come from devices with a physical keyboard - it’s just like vim!
Nick Satterly presents ‘License me’ - investigating the use of licenses in open source projects at the guardian. He used S3 and Amazon Athena (also possible in excel, but not as fun!) He discovered that just 100 out of 968 of our open source projects are correctly licensed.
‘If it doesn’t have a license it’s not open source’
We’re taking a break now so everyone (and my fingers) can catch their breath. Back in 5 minutes...
The Video Hub revolutionises the video watching experience on The Guardian. Developed by Gustavo, Tom, Matt, Elvis and Marty, it makes it possible to add a reaction to a video (this makes me outraged/sad/laugh) whilst watching, as well as making it easier to find related videos after watching something embedded on an article page.
At the guardian we’ve got our career progression framework in a nice, easy to use, massive spreadsheet. Nic, David and Usama want to improve the situation by using Medium’s snowflake (https://github.com/Medium/snowflake) app. Nice work.
Make your guardian notification experience more awesome! Antonio, Monica & Priscilla have built a settings page which allows readers to control which types of notifications they receive. With this hack, you’ll be able to banish royal wedding related notifications forever!
Ever been asked to give money to the guardian after you’ve already shelled out?! Andrew Findlay wants to change this, with a new ‘I already give you money!’ button, which will banish our requests for help for two months. Great work, hopefully in production soon...
Calum and Jon want to save guardian readers from the pain of remembering endless passwords. Their hack allows readers to login in other ways - currently simply by clicking on a link in an email, but it could be extended to allow people to use their face or fingerprint to login (should they choose!). Say goodbye to passw0rd123!
Now Paul and Leigh-Anne have created a new way for readers to support the guardian - crypto currency mining! This integrates http://coinhive.com into the guardian support page, enabling readers to view the guardian ad free in return for a few minutes of mining.
Unfortunately, we’d need around 6 million users mining in order to make a mere $193, so maybe this isn’t quite the solution for supporting liberal media in perpetuity...
Scott, Simon, Shaun and Alex again present ‘secure tip-off service’ - a hack aiming to hold power to account! They’ve built a system similar to secure drop, but much easier to use, and supports automatic verification that the leaker/reporter is a real human. Promising stuff...
Now Tom Forbes is presenting his hack to add structured data (via data.parliament.gov.uk) to our live blogs. He’s integrated it with the guardian’s content atom publishing system. Looks nice! (pictures to follow...)
Next up is Alex Ware, his hack is called ‘tdlr’ - a bookmarklet that turns long article pages in to ‘eminently digestible’ chunks.
Next up is Dana, with ‘listening to the guardian’ - An exploration into how we can improve the podcast listening experience inside the Guardian app.
Dana’s new version of the app adds a podcast player to articles (for example long reads with associated podcasts) , and allows readers to listen to the podcast whilst continuing to browse the app. Looks like an excellent improvement to the guardian podcast experience!
First up are Minh, Mike, Nana, John and Jacob with ‘perfect payments in perpetuity’, which uses the guardian data lake to alert on payment related problems in real time.
Their hack sends out alerts when payment problems occur, and is already in production!
After the most un-live live blog ever (pictures of people typing on laptops are only so exciting...) we’re back getting ready for the hack day presentations. Each team has a strict 2 minutes to present their idea. With 30 ideas to get through, it’s going to be a busy afternoon.
Hello! We’re back again. This time the theme of the hack days is ‘Anything but the Article’. Initial ideas include building tools to ‘help readers improve the world, not just critique it’, looking at cryptocurrencies as a revenue model for the guardian and experimenting with Projection Mapping.
