After the success of the eventful Hack Day London in 2007 I was very keen on attending the 2008 generation of the event called Mashed. This was held last week in London’s Alexandra Palace again. The name change comes from the event being run and partly sponsored by the BBC, and the Hack Day brand is associated with the prior co-sponsor Yahoo.

This is an event where lots of people, be they developers, designers, engineers, or anyone else who creates stuff, get together and creates something in 24 hours. There are few restrictions on what you can do and although you have to use an API from on of the sponsors to enter the compassion you can produce anything you want.

One of the best bits about such an event is that it gives you the chance to work with other people who have different skills so you can create far more than you can on your own. I was asked by Euan Spence to join the Social Flight Simulator team and I was also planning on working on a hardware mashup with Pete and Brian, and anyone else who wanted to join in. Naturally there was not enough time to do all this, but the flight sim worked and we won something. I will blog about what we achieved in the near future.

The event was well organised again and there were many improvements. Strangely most of the improvement involved simplifying things. The only recommendations I can make is to reintroduce the welcome so new people know what is going on and so people can find others to help with there projects, and to introduce recycling bins.

There were free buses laid on this time from many places throughout the country and I thought this was a great idea to make the event less Londoncentric. It was a great shame that few signed up for them, even fewer turned up, and the Newcastle/Sheffield bus only had three of us on. One of the reasons was probably the 2am departure time, but I don’t have a solution for this problem.

The event was covered in part by the BBC’s Click and there are plenty or photos on flickr. Well done all involved, and hopefully see you next year.

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