Okay, so let it be said that I’m not the greatest event organizer in the world. In fact I am pretty terrible, however when discussing the idea of a potential hacknight for students on BSc Web Design at UWE with Mark Smith and Alex Jegtnes I decided it was an idea which was worthy of my time.

The original idea was to get the first and second year students together in a room, and to spend an evening getting to know them, and creating some hilarious and probably dysfunctional websites.

Every time we spoke to someone else about the idea, it kind of snowballed. Some people wanted to take the evening off campus, others suggested inviting the third years and everything became a bit of a blur.

In the end, we had a mixed group of First, Second, Third and Graduates having a generally nice time working on university or personal projects, talking about the web, the course, and placements.

It was a really fun few hours, with various projects started which can be viewed here (currently none of the projects started have been published)

For future evenings, A few things need to be addressed. The first being a way of enticing the first year students to come and get involved. The few that I met were genuinely interested in the course, and the web and wanted to produce cool stuff. Which in the end, is what everyone wants to do.

After speaking to some very helpful contributors on the first year’s facebook group it has been suggested that we run some workshop style talks about cool shit, perhaps I can get Steve Lacey to come do his talk on git again.

Secondly, transport. Because it’s an evening event it’s awkward for people living off campus to get home after, which leads them to not  being able to attend. If a solution can be found I imagine the attendance would be much higher.

Anyway, thanks everyone that did attend, hopefully we can do this again and possibly better in the new year.