What seems like every other weekend I will travel around the country to attend Hack Days, I tell this to the family, friends, random people who come into the sweet shop and they give me that smile and nod which says sure?

Hack day in a paragraph

Stick a hundred or so geeks in a room and give them a challange and a prize to compete for and step back and watch the magic happen.

Ingredients of a Hack day

• A bunch of designers & developers
• A big room / lots of rooms
• Lots of wifi
• Loads of food, sweetie goodness and Boost (Other drinks are avilable)

Why do people do this?

It all depends, some people do it for the prizes (I’ve won everything from Lego Mindstorms NXTs, A trip to San Francisco, an AR Drone, £10,000 of 02 Media Spend, An xBox 360 to random items from the pound shop and iPhone Stickers)

Hack Days have enabled me to work in some amazing places, this weekend for instance I’m spending the weekend working in The Guardian HQ which is one of my fav. hack day venues.

My coding ability has increased twenty fold since I started hackdays, for the first few hack days, I’d come up with the idea, pitch it to the team, let them develop it and twiddle my thumbs for 22 hours then I’d do the presentation at the end of the day.

Now I feel confident enough to actually contribute to the team development wise and it’s only because of learning in this high pressure time limited enviroment.

But I’ve never coded anything before

Depending on the hack day you go to, that won’t matter, at Leeds Hack we had three or four people turn up how had never done any development before and at least two of them stayed the full 24 hours going through tutorials and asking questions, 24 hours later they had a github repo with a website in they had developed themselves (and they understood what a repo was!)

What are the challenges

Usually they are set by sponsors, for instance FlyBMI gave us exclusive access to an API and had a prize for the best use of that API.

Prizes are also given for ‘best in show’, ‘most useful’, ‘comedy hack’ and whatever else the organisers think will fit.