First, an apology: it has been far, far too long since my last blog post. Emmigration, moving house and a well-deserved holiday have kept me away from the keyboard. I’ll be getting back up to speed and putting a few projects together in the coming weeks.

I am currently back in Leeds, visiting friends and whilst I’m annoyed that I missed this year’s Think Visibility, organiser Dom has teamed up with mad scientist Tim Nash to put together a hack day and I can make it!

Hack Day Ideas

I need to think of some project ideas to fill my time at Hackday, so here are a few initial thoughts. If any interest you or you think I would make a good addition to your team, do get in touch.

SMS

The event is being held in AQ Ltd’s headquarters in Leeds. AQ offer an excellent (and easy) SMS to CGI gateway that I have used before so I’d like some kind of mobile/SMS element to the project. Twitter has shown that integrating SMS technologies with the web can be hugely successful - largely due to simplicity and accessibility of the ideas.

Location

Maps are favourite tool of mashup makers and 24 hour hackers are no exception, so a location element would be a good addition to the project. Getting location data from a mobile phone can be tricky though, any mobile developers going to Hack Day able to offer assistance?

As the YDN are a sponsor, Fire Eagle might also be a good fit for the location data.

Data, Data, Data

A nice big dataset is always useful for a quick mashup (saves a lot of time entering or discovering the data yourself) and there are a lot available on the web if you know where to look. (BTW Wikileaks has the entire UK postcode database avilable, have a search).

Another event sponsor is SUN Startup Essentials who offer (amongst other things) MySql licenses and cheap hardware, so a big, fat RDBMS could be on the cards.

My Skills

I should outline how I can help your team or why you should join up with me for the event: I have over fifteen years of experience developing software across a range of platforms and industries, I can write Perl, PHP, Javascript, C++, SQL and HTML. I have experience of network programming, database design and user interface design too.

So, if you want to discuss project ideas or put a team together then please get in touch or leave a comment below.

There are still tickets left, get yours free now if you haven’t signed up already. See you there!

Creative Commons Licensed Photo by wEnDaLicious.