Holsee's Blog

It was about 4 months ago when I through the idea out on twitter of an open developer event in Belfast which encouraged developers from all backgrounds to come together for the cross pollination of ideas and some communal hacking. 

This was picked up by Blaine Cook and David Wilson and soon after it became a reality!  They had been thinking for a while about setting up an event in the guise of Super Happy Dev House here in Northern Ireland.

We made one twist thou… we held it in a Castle!

The first ever Super Happy Dev Castle is now over… and what an event it was.

We had some exceptional hosts (Blaine & Maurine) for the inaugural event, who we simply cannot thank enough! SHDC #0 took place on Saturday 6th February and ran through to the Sunday morning.

We had around 24 people throughout the course of the all night hack-a-thon with projects ranging from ultra fast data processing and real time search of Translink route data to the release of an open source JavaScript ePub library.

I personally worked on Sourced, and open source light weight SFTP editor written in Java… it’s something like Coda.  I worked on refactoring the design into a more testable MVC structure. I also toyed with using Groovy as the language for the UI aspect of the application and the creation of a plug-in API which would allow for a plug-in DSL to be created in Groovy.

There was plenty of craic (maybe too much at times)… and lots of nerdy conversations.  The crowd was mixed, ranging from hardcore hardware hackers through to php script kiddies. (Even a few designers managed to sneak in to do some wire framing =P)!

A good time was had by all!  The next event will hopefully be held in just over a months time with a venue yet to be confirmed.

We are also toying with the idea of making some T-Shirts, everyone knows nerds <3 T-Shirts!!

Happy Hacking!