Epic Pusher Hacks at the Guardian in London

On Saturday I attended a hack day organised by Apigee and hosted in The Guardien offices in London. It’s great to go to hack events and see the innovative ways that developers can use Pusher. At my last count at least 6 teams used Pusher but we had to choose a winner…

Our winner: Wormr

Built by the guys from Assanka (who, as you can tell from the sneaky screenshot they sent me, are hiring).

Wormr is targeted at two types of user:

Speakers

"If you’re giving a talk, and want to know how people are feeling through the duration of your talk, add the wormr JavaScript code to your slides and get realtime feedback."

Audiences

"Delighted? Disagree? Love it? Frustrated? Amazed? Bored? With wormr, you can now give your feedback direct to the speaker. If you’re in a talk right now, then enter the talk id and start voting."

The reason I like this is that it’s something I’ve actually built a little widget for myself that does something similar, but not as well. Realtime feedback within a presentation is a really cool idea, if nothing else it shows off the realtime technology really well. Great work guys. You deserved your Arduino kit. I hope to see the same innovation in using it.

I also found out that the guys built Meteor in 2006. Great to meet some realtime web tech pioneers. I hope to drag them over to using Pusher soon :)

Noteworthy mentions

Nobody Expects

The Nobody Expects team (yes, they were all Spanish) built a realtime hangman game. But, instead of saving a man from being hung you had to save a cat from being burnt (they do like cats, it was just a game). It was multiplayer and used Pearson and Pusher.

Realtime Switchboard

Our friend from Twilio, Stevie Graham, built a switchboard web app where users could phone a Twilio number and the number of the caller would then instantly be pushed to a web dashboard using Pusher. Then the call could be answered and conversation would ensue using Twilio. Very cool and very useful.

I hope to write another blog post about this in the future

Who else was there?

Along with us the APIs represented at the event covered a range of functionalit and potential:

• Vodafone, who are looking to push out a bunch of new APIS, but made sendMessage, trackPhone and makePayment methods available for the event
• Pearson offering access to a Longman Dictionary API (with useful audio samples), FT Press and Eyewitness Guides
• Betfair with a massive range of functionality, with an obvious focus on betting
• inmobi focusing on mobile advertising

We want to be at your hack day

If you are running a hack day and need API representatives please give us a shout. We’d love to get involved.