A hackawhhat you say? Well, Let me explain…

Put simply, a hackathon is an event where programmers (usually) have a short amount of time to “hack” together code in order to demo a cool idea or feature, it doesn’t have to be pretty, and it doesn’t have to work fully, but it has to illustrate an idea, a concept.

In our case (as with most) the hackathon ran from 6pm on Sunday to 7am on Monday, that’s over 12 hours of solid coding… tiring, but extremely fun! Don’t let all this talk of code fool you however, there wasn’t just a team of people haplessly typing on keyboards and writing code, we also had some teams working offline as well.

Simon and Tom planning how their HTML5 game will work

Tom and Rob in the early stages of their projects

Camilo doing some Zombie attack recovery planning

Keeping the adrenalin running, a quick 1am Nerf battle

Ben & Bryony turned our mundane shed into a DJ Booth

Our creative team getting their hands dirty with plasticine and some stop motion

Still awake, and still working, daylight had returned!

A quick mid project demo

Of course I had to chronicle the events of the night. By the end of the sprint we were tired, but not defeated, although we did all go home and sleep…

If you weren’t lucky enough to be there in person, Newspepper have released the video of my presentation at the April 2011 Facebook Developer Garage London.

Unfortunately the video is almost useless unless you can see the slides that I am presenting, so here they are again:

Again, I would love to know what you thought of it, so please let me know!

Newspepper has just posted a video report from the April 2011 Facebook Developer Garage in London, the one at which I presented my talk titled Facebook API in the Real World

To clarify, in case people watch it and get the wrong idea; I wasn’t giving a huge plug about how big our site Miniclip.com is, my interview did consist of more than that, what was shown in the video was an answer to 1 out of about 7 questions, and just happened to be chosen by the director!

You can find my appearances at 2.07 and 4.38 of the video embedded above.

If anyone reading this was lucky enough to see the presentation first hand, please let me know what you thought of it, I am always interested in feedback!

Last night I spoke as a guest speaker at the Facebook Developer Garage in London, the topic of my talk was how we at Miniclip have integrated the Facebook Platform to help engage our 20,000,000 registered users while playing our games. I also took the time to post a few problems that we have encountered while developing on the platform and the things we have done to overcome them.

Slides from the presentation can be seen below….Enjoy!

I would love to know what you thought about the presentation so please let me know!

Last week the refreshed design of the Crossways & Sea View website went live!

Crossways & Sea View offers Holiday Cottages and Apartments in Torquay, Devon.

Along with the design refresh a few nice features were added. Visitors can now check the availability between specified dates or the availability of a particular apartment and apartments can now be filtered by type or bedrooms.

If you’re looking for a holiday and would like Self Catering Cottages & Apartments in Torquay then visit the website!

Last week I released a small update to myfbid.com which allows you to see the User ID’s of all the friends you have for the currently logged in user.

The profile photos of all your friends are displayed near the bottom of the page, you can hover over each one to see their ID and go to their profile.

Myfbid.com allows you to login to Facebook and will immediately show your Facebook User ID. No personal data is collected or stored during the process – it simply looks up User ID’s and displays it on the page.

I would like to build the site into something even more useful for developers, so if anyone has any thoughts about the kind things can be added to ease the pain of developing on Facebook then I would love to hear about them.