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Over The Air prepares for a Very British hack weekend

Bobbie Johnson — Wed, 30 May 2012 13:59:49 +0000

It’s nearly 70 years since England’s Bletchley Park first played host to a gaggle of coders, when a team including computing pioneer Alan Turing got together to crack critical Nazi ciphers in a move that was pivotal in winning the Second World War.

But this weekend the estate is welcoming another horde of programmers, as the Over The Air hack festival arrives once again.

Now in its fifth year, more than 600 people are expected to turn up for the free-to-attend event, which focuses on 36 hours of mobile hacking, building and talks. This year’s speakers have a scientific bent, with Ariel Waldman of Spacehack and Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow Francois Grey discussing citizen science.

“We’re now Europe’s biggest mobile hack event, in a big way,” says co-founder Matthew Cashmore, who — alongside friends Daniel Appelquist and Margaret Gold — organizes the event in his spare time.

Not everybody is keen on hack weekends, though: just last week one prominent U.K. entrepreneur accused hack events of treating coders like “monkeys in a cage”. But the organizers say that they are focused on getting people together for exciting, fun projects — not profit. In fact, they say, some sponsors even use the event as a recruiting ground to hire developer talent — not simply lift their work or ideas.

“It’s all about science hacking and what people can do with publicly available data from space probes and telescopes,” says Cashmore. “We always try to balance practical sessions with inspirational ones.”

Staging the event at Bletchley, which houses the U.K’s National Museum of Computing, started last year. And, given that it’s staged over the Queen’s Jubilee celebration weekend, it all seems a very genteel approach to the idea of the hack weekend — connecting a nation of tinkerers with new technology and teaching, a long way from the mercenary approach critics decry.

But while attendees are more likely to come away with free bean bags than bellies full of cream tea, the setting of a venerable estate steeped in such history makes it a very British event indeed.

“Somebody said it to me last year,” says Cashmore. “When do you reckon was the last time there were this many geeks at Bletchley Park?”

Photograph of Bletchley Park used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user draco2008

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‘Hack weekends treat coders like monkeys in a cage’

Bobbie Johnson — Mon, 21 May 2012 08:25:09 +0000

Serial entrepreneur Ryan Carson, who has built a series of conferences and education services for web designers and developers in the U.K., says he has had enough of hackathons.

According to him, they’re run by opportunists looking to cash in on the eagerness of young talent for their own purposes:

The problem is that articles like This City Never Sleeps, and Neither do the Hackers and job posts that mention hacker mansions are starting to appear everywhere.

It’s a joke and I’m tired of it. Developers aren’t monkeys in a cage who can’t wait to do the next “hackathon”. They’ve got families, bills to pay and every other pressure that normal people do. They don’t want to drink Red Bull all night and sleep under their desks.

Next time someone asks if you want to crash at their hacker mansion for the summer (which has a ppol, BBQ and pool table!) or team up for a 24-hour hackathon, think twice. They’re probably just trying to cash in on your youth and optimism.

Does he have a point?

I’ve certainly seen the number of them multiply massively over the past few years, which means the quality and intent now varies wildly. Some are good, some are bad. But the general underlying cultural trend definitely seems to be there — the idea that you can (and should) convince a few hackers to develop things in their spare time using a mixture of Red Bull, pizza and some vague dream about building The Next Big Thing.

Sometimes these are great community events that bring people together to do fun stuff; sometimes they feel exploitative — and involvement can certainly be tricky for those who don’t want to buy into macho coder culture.

Over on Hacker News the post has generated some pushback (as you might expect, given that it’s a hangout for people who generally subscribe to this sort of ethos). Butit’s important, of course, to remember that there is no concerted effort here to undermine, and plenty of people happily engage in hack events of all stripes. There is no great Hackathon Authority arranging all of these events, depriving ordinary working stiffs of their weekends. It is simply a confluence of different people all seeing benefits in the same thing.

Is it just a case of calling out the bad seeds?

Photograph of Ryan Carson used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user jeffkward

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