Hackference Birmingham

While not specifically designed for a single technology or skill set it was a great opportunity to meet people who built things for the web across a wide spectrum of technologies and products. The Fazeley Studios venue was an intriguing mix of marble, fine art and trendy office spaces and must be an inspiring place to work on a day to day basis.

The conference was keynoted by Syd Lawrence (of instac.at fame - possibly the finest use of the Austrian TLD?) who, through the medium of animated gif slides, reminded us of the positive effects hack days have both to the development of personal tech skills as well as being able to fold those experiences back into the workplace. It's important to periodically remind yourself that you shouldn't be working just for the sake of work, but for fun. Play/fun/making something... these are great motivating factors and whether it's with Lego, wood, paint or Javascript (other languages are available!) we should all strive to enjoy what we create.

There were great session on good API design from Lorna Jane, an introduction to Clojure and how it improves on Java, building algorithms to make rhyming couplets from Twitter with Go, and a really fun demonstration how node.js is used to power quadracopters. For those of you who haven't seen one of these Parrot AR drones they're pretty amazing, and Andrew Nesbitt was controlling one over wifi with an xbox360 controller and later, a Javascript library for a Kinect. We didn't even have any injuries in the audience.

There were sessions on the latest tools for automating workflows and dependencies, such as grunt.js and bower. I've used grunt.js a little over the Summer and I'm keen to put it to use on a future Drupal project where we expect it to compliment tools such as drush.

The conference was a great opportunity for me to find out first hand about Riak - an open source distributed database for people with lots, and lots, and lots of data who need fault tolerance and availability over data consistency. The guys from Basho were really great to chat to and we've now got The Little Book of Riak in our office. 

Next time I'd love to stick around for the hack day too, but overall I find conferences like Hackference are great for taking stock of other technologies and sparking ideas for both existing and new projects. For instance, I'm always struggling to remember which bin goes out at the end of the week... there's a potential side project in the form of a page scraper/parser for my local council site and a weekly email/tweet to remind me.