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…

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!

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!

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!

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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.

Their arrival signifies the start of a European expansion in conjunction with the continued push for developers and sites to adopt the Open Graph Protocol. At the event a number of interesting statistics were announced by Zuckerberg and the other executives.

The major announcement was that Facebook has now reached 26 million unique users in the UK. Also announced was 50% of all “Likes” originate from within Europe, which is about 50 million out of the reported 100 million likes so far, an early indicatator of the popularity of the Social Plugin platform released at f8 a few months ago.

Mark Zuckerberg talking about the new Facebook Open Graph API in London

During his introduction Mark Zuckerberg talked about the interesting applications that he’d seen at the Facebook Hackathon the previous day, and reiterated what was said at the f8 conference, how important the Open Graph and Social Plug-ins are to enable social experiences across the web and how easy it is to implement. He also talked a bit more about the Instant Personalisation feature that has recieved so much critisism in recent weeks, explaining that the reason for it is to allow users to have a seamless and frictionless social expericence while browsing other sites than Facebook, removing the need for them to “Connect” or “Login” to Facebook in order to see a the site in a social context.

Mark Zuckerberg talking about the new Facebook Open Graph API in London

After Zuckerberg’s keynote several high profile partners were brought on stage to discuss their success stories on the Facebook Platform, amongst them was Gustav Söderström, VP of Products from Spotify about how they used the platform to create a new generation of social music application.

Mike Vernal, Platform Engineering Manager

Mike Vernal spoke about all the new technology innovations in the Graph API and the Social Plugins, he talked about the evolution of the platform and a number of other things to help developers understand the latest offerings from Facebook.

Joanna Shields, VP of Sales and Business Development, EMEA

Joanna Sheilds has recently taken on the role of Sales and Business Development in Europe, she spoke about how important it was for Facebook to continue it’s expansion in the EU and talked about the ways they will be engaging with the developer community to help the platform grow.

Mark Zuckerberg, Ethan Beard and Mike Vernal chatting in the Q&A

At the end Mark Zuckerberg, Ethan Beard, Mike Vernal and Joanna Shields sat and answered questions from the room full of press and developers, amongst the topics talked about was the new “Credits” system that Facebook has been testing with a select number of partners such as Zynga and PlayFish, all they revealed was that they are working on fine tuning the payment methods to make it as frictionless as possable to end users and that they would be talking more about it in the coming months, they did say however that eventually the Credits platform will be open to all developers to use in their applications.

In response to a question about a Location API and a set of services built around a users Location Zuckerberg simply answered that they were working on their Location services but offered no timeframe for when we will begin to hear more about them.

Zuckerberg was also asked about the 5,000 friend limit on all Facebook accounts, to which he explained that it was not high on the development list since not very many people had over 5,000 friends in real life, and explained that the reason for the limit in the first place was due to people with high volumes of friends having a poor experience due of the sheer amount of friend data that needed to be processed on each page request.

The event marked a good turning point for all European based Facebook Developers and it will be good to see more of a Facebook presence outside of their Palo Alto offices in California.

Our application, codenamed “MiniPlay”, allows users to place themselves at the centre of the gameplay by giving them a number of short and engaging games using their friends as characters, the more games they play, the more games they unlock, and the more awards they get. Unfortunately by the end of the evening we only got about 75% of the way through the first game, but managed to create a framework to allow us to easily add games to the application. Whilst we were hacking away Zuckerberg came around to have a chat about what we were doing and wanted to know what we thought of the platform in general, and where they could improve.

At the end of the Hackathon we all had to present the application to Mark Zuckerberg, I drew the short straw to demo the application in front of the Facebook Executives and a room of about 60 other developers, it was quite a surreal experience having the attention of one of the industries most influential thinkers for a few minutes.

The best 3 applications would get a chance to demo their apps on stage at the Developer Garage the next day, but unfortunately, as much as Mark seemed to be really into social gaming, we didn’t make it into the top 3.

Even though our application didn’t get into the top 3 it was a great experience and gave us all some ideas about how to leverage the Graph to build better, and more social applications.

MiniPlay game selection screen

Buddy Lineup Game

The Team Miniclip Room

Ben being interviewed by the resident Developer Garage film crew

Mark Zuckerberg hanging around for a chat before the presentations

Simon and Ben relaxing before the final demo

As part of that research I decided to fill a void in my development time – I’m forever trying to find the Facebook User ID of the user I am currently logged in as – and it doesn’t help when you have 10+ testing accounts, plus my own personal account.

So I threw together this:

Myfbid.com allows you to login (Using the Facebook OpenGraph API) and it will immediately show you your current Facebook User ID, you can logout and login again with a different account and it will do the same for that one.

No personal data is collected or stored during the process – it simply looks up your User ID and shows it on the page.

Over time I will add some more features, the ability to see your Friends User ID’s perhaps and some other cool things that will help developers.

Hope some people find it useful!

If you’re looking for speed, then you’re going to be very disappointed, the Facebook API certainly isn’t the fastest thing on the planet – it doesn’t take many API calls to get the page to load in 4+ seconds, added to that any additional overhead and you can quite easily hit the 8 – 9 second timeout limit. To try and overcome this I have a few tips that have helped me speed up the process a little:

1. Less is more!

The old saying is true, sometimes the less you do something, the better it is. The same goes for the Facebook API – the more you make API calls the slower the page will be.

Some of the common causes that I have found is calling the API inside a loop, not only does this have the potential to create hundreds of requests, but it also will cause a noticeable performance hit, so looping through a user’s 350 friends to get their names isn’t the best way to get things done.

If at all possible try and limit the number of API calls per page, there are usually FBML tags that do things a lot faster than calling methods on the API.

2. Batch API Calls

For situations where many API calls are unavoidable, try using the Batch API. By doing this you will save quite a lot of overhead by requesting all the data in one large chunk, and not in multiple little pieces that take longer because of the time taken to transfer the data. Depending on the usage you will see a relatively big performance increase by using this method.

$facebook->api_client->begin_batch();
$friends = & $api_client->friends_get();
$notifications = & $api_client->notifications_get();
$facebook->api_client->end_batch();

3. Cache

While you aren’t allowed to store a user’s data forever you are allowed to store it for up to 24 hours. In addition to this there is some data that you are allowed to store, for a full list take a look at the Storable Data documentation. One of the biggest things is to decide if any of the allowed storable entities would save you an API call or two, and then see if replicating some of the data in your own databases would lead to better performance.

4. Quick Transitions

For me this was perhaps the most noticeable performance boost of them all, and it was only be chance that I discovered it. To see for yourself:

1. Go into the Developer App
2. Go to your application settings
3. Click on the canvas tab
4. At the bottom there is an option called “Quick Transitions” – turn it on.

5. General Optimisations

I maybe stating the obvious but it’s worth saying just in case.

All the optimisations above will help speed up your application, but the most important thing to do is to make sure ALL your code is as optimised as it can be, not only PHP, but also the markup and CSS, theres no point in making the API calls as efficient as possible if the app is just going to sit there for a few seconds while it decides what to do with it.

There’s not much I can really say about how and what to optimise, but I did find the following code useful to check the page execution times:

$start = microtime(true);

// Do stuff in here

$end = microtime(true);
$time = $end - $start;
echo "Done in $time seconds";

Use this code to test the execution time of the page or a certain function or method call.

Conclusion

Happy Performance Tuning!