London Real-time

Hosted at White Bear Yard in London, Friday 13th to Sunday 15th April, I and a group of friends hacked together a system for aggregating social data for events. We used the Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare streaming APIs and built a prototype of a scalable system using Node.js, Redis, RabbitMQ and Pusher, hosted on Heroku.

The event was great fun, although again I had far too little sleep. We undertook quite an ambitious project and ended up with a pretty good proof-of-concept which we presented on the Sunday afternoon to the judges from the sponsoring API providers and one of the staff at White Bear Yard.

There were loads of really interesting projects completed over the course of the weekend, but a few in particular that I liked were a collaborative web-based drum machine which users could add sounds to through Twilio, and a hilarious web service called Girlfriend that could ’nag’ you at regular intervals to keep you awake at hackathons.

The hack weekend was a great success which can largely be attributed to some great planning, I particularly liked the deal with Pret A Manger for free coffee whenever we wanted just by showing our #ldnrealtime wrist-bands. It was also a really good opportunity for me to spend some time at White Bear Yard where I will be working this summer at GoSquared