Marcus Noble

For the third year running I attended Hackference again. Once again, a 1 day conference followed by a 24 hour hackathon and as always a really great weekend.

The conference was opened by Jon Kingsley talking about device hacking in a fetching cape.

The day included a wide range of great talks including an integer that you can't use in JS, calls to Ben's mother, a promise of cake, live coding a slide clicker, tips for releasing your website on Mars and a sobering look at privacy.

As always, the hackathon was great fun. While I didn't crank out my usual 4+ hacks this year (tiredness hit me hard) I did manage to tinker on a couple things. I managed to put together a fun little "Virtual Stickers" app that let you scan QR codes to unlock stickers that you could place on your screen and create a collage from. This could then be downloaded or shared with others. I also managed to put together a crude Alexa Flash Briefing to tell you what Digital Oxford meetups were happening in the next week.

Many great hacks came out of the weekend such as Tinder for GitHub, GitHub contributions graph as music, Kudeliscope and the ever useful Is It a Bench?.

Every year I find more and more friends at Hackference, new and old, many whom I only see at these events. I have so much love for Mike for putting on this event and providing me with the chance to connect with so many amazing people.