For the past 24 hours, there has been an open hackday/hackfest/hackathon/something in Oulu, Finland – where I live.
This was the first (or second, depending on how you count) open hack day held here, and probably one of the first few held in Finland too.
The event
The event itself was a hack day, basically a bit like a LAN party but for programming, with the goal of making a demo of something in 24 hours.
There were around 50 people participating at the event, with people from all over Finland.
7 hacks were presented at the end of the event.
Being the first public one I think it worked quite well. There were drinks to be had and pizza to be eaten, one person was locked outside the building for 30 minutes (I think) and had to resort to throwing small stones at the windows to get noticed and back in… but altogether it was a pretty good start from my perspective.
My team’s hack
I participated in the event with my coworkers Kristian and Petri.
We decided that we’d hack on a new web service concept we had been planning.
The chosen development tools for this were:
- PHP 5.3
- Zend Framework
- Doctrine 2
- And some miscelaneous JavaScript things
We managed to cobble together a lot of functionality. Kristian worked mostly on making the UI look nice, Petri took care of the infrastructure (servers and such) with me doing most of the PHP/JS coding.
During the work we came into a few conclusions:
- Doctrine 2 rocks and is perfectly usable for production
- HTML5 geolocation is pretty useful and it works even on a laptop with no GPS
Other cool hacks
After the demos everyone voted for their favorite Qt, UBI and other hacks. (A UBI display is a technology being developed at the University of Oulu, which is basically a big touch screen with some stuff in it. See the UBI website for more details.)
Here are my favorites of the bunch:
QuiaQuia, a Qt-based client for HeiaHeia. The team that made it had even managed to throw in some polish in form of nice UI transitions between views and it ran on Nokia’s mobile phones.
4squbi, a FourSquare app for UBI displays. It displays your location and nearby FourSquare locations and tips, with a map. (Photo)
MisterWorm, a text-based version, kind of like a text adventure game, of the good old “worm game”. It even integrated with twitter, posting where the worm was going there!
The others were very nice too, and you can find a list of them at Oulu Open Hack’s wiki
In closing
All in all this was a fun event. I wish I could have stayed the night and hacked at our app, but I had felt a bit under the weather so I decided to play it safe and get some sleep. Still, we got a lot done.
Thanks to the organizers and sponsors for making this event possible. Hopefully we can do this again next year!
Search on twitter for #ouluopenhack for some tweets and photos from the event.