Foursquare Hackathon Cardiff - Day 1

I was fully intending to try and live-blog the progress of the foursquare hackathon today, even going as far as to install a live blog plugin, but things have been going very quickly and we’ve been hitting the coding hard so I just haven’t had time!

We’ve managed to get a decent crowd in, a roughly 50:50 split of people we already knew from the School and other people from elsewhere. At the peak today we had fifteen people in, but at this stage we’re down to ten - but those who have left are coming back tomorrow! There’s an interesting mix of skills and knowledge levels and a number of people have come who are just eager to see how other people do things and to learn more about foursquare or coding in general. Luckily everyone is talkative and keen to get on and create something cool.

We started this morning at about 10am and managed to come up with a few ideas in a brief brainstorming session, eventually splitting ourselves into groups working on two ideas. The first idea is being driven forward by Vlad and is quite related to the work we’re doing on Recognition - creating a system to pull in information on a venue or location and create a ‘digest’ of what’s relevant about the place. This could come in handy later on for our research. The second idea is a more ‘fun’ idea - building a system for creating, managing and participating in pub crawls. There’s a couple of parts to this: a management website that allows users to search foursquare venues and add them to a crawl, a backend that manages the storage and retrieval of users and crawls and an application front end that allows you to participate in the crawl itself. At this stage early on day one we’ve got most of the backend built, and the management web app is coming along well. Tomorrow we’re going to start the android app.