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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Travel
John Baron

Signing off for the weekend - with hacks, hackers and Leeds Digital Festival

I'm signing off for the weekend now.

But I just wanted to highlight the Leeds Digital Festival and tomorrow's first overnight 'Hack Day' in the North of England in Holbeck Urban Village tomorrow.

The festival is a week of events taking place across the city highlighting the digital sector in the lead up to the DADI Awards next Friday, which is a national awards ceremony celebrating the cream of digital communications over the last twelve months. A full list of events can be found here.

Bringing software developers, designers, engineers, and animators together for a frantic 24 hours of development, innovation and creativity, the Leeds Hack Day, held at City Inn, has been organised to celebrate this year's Leeds Digital Festival.

Dom Hodgson of Hodgetastic, the Leeds-based web development and events company behind tomorrow's hack day, said:

"A hack day is simply an opportunity for anyone with an interest in the digital sector, be it web developers, apps programmers, software specialists of digital designers, to meet up in an informal way and learn something new without the pressure of business.

"The event is held over a weekend and is totally free to attend, it's about trying new things and finding new talents working with people who you may otherwise never get the chance to meet."

Originally held by leading technology companies such as Yahoo and Google, a Hack Day is designed to stimulate innovation by removing the barriers and constraints in a normal work environment. The people taking part are given access to large quantities of data and a time constraint to create anything they feel would be useful or work to a specific brief if they choose.

Hack Days lead to the creation of anything from new website and viral games to mobile apps and on-line platforms.

Leanne Buchan, marketing officer for Holbeck Urban Village at Leeds Council added:


"The Hack Day is an event that reflects the businesses we have in the area and the idea of bringing those people together without work rivalries or the daily distractions of an office environment to create genuinely unique and engaging platforms is fantastic way to celebrate the digital sector we have in Holbeck and across the city."

In a new twist on the hack day format, visitor passes are also available for those wanting to find out more about hack days and take a sneak peak at what 24 hours of uninterrupted development time can achieve.

Previous Hack Day creation Tweet Trumps is an on-line game which had more than 15,000 plays in the first three days and still receives more than 200 visits per day.

Have a good 'un.

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