The “This is IBM” videos are a nice intro to some of the things that we work on at Hursley.
They’re not too technical, they’re not “sales-y” for IBM products, they’re interesting stories, and each one is only a few minutes long.
I also like them as I’ve worked with all of these awesome people before, so it’s fun to see them being all serious on camera – even if it makes me a little jealous that they’re so much better at it than me!
Scratch is a visual programming language and drag-and-drop coding platform for children.
Scratch Day is an annual world-wide network of events where kids come together to make things in Scratch.
Their logo sums it up beautifully:
Kids of different ages come together and meet each other. They share their experiences of coding – finding out the differences between what they each learn about coding in their different schools.
They try and make something. It’s basically a hack day for kids – where the kids are encouraged to use Scratch to make their hacks.
Most importantly, they share their experiences. They talk about the things they tried, the challenges they faced, and the things they learned along the way. And they demo the things that worked.
On May 12th that happened around the world, in close to a thousand venues, big and small.
One of them was IBM Hursley. We invited local families to the lab to take part in a small local Scratch Day.
Today was IBM HackDay 6 – an internal HackDay run across IBM‘s many labs – and I managed to spend a bit of today hacking something together.
In a nutshell, it’s kinda like Plazes, brightkite, dodgeball and others… find out where your friends currently are. And see where they are from your mobile.
The twist is that it gives you quite precise locations for friends within a known indoor campus – such as Hursley Park.
Hursley, like many IBM locations, is a campus, with thousands of employees in a 100 acre site.
What if you’re trying to find someone? Say you’re in a meeting, and a colleague hasn’t turned up yet. Where are they? Are they on their way?
Or you’ve arranged to meet a colleague for lunch or a coffee, and you seem to keep missing each other.
The idea of this hack was to build on the Hursley Maps tool to come up with some way for you to be able to quickly check where your friends are while you’re at work.
Okay… so it’s a fairly flimsy scenario. 🙂
But I’ve enjoyed playing with location-based services ideas before, and thought this would be an interesting twist. Plus, it was an excuse to play with Django which I’ve wanted to try since hearing about it at BathCamp.