'Developer Happiness' event creates useful new tools

There are already tangible outputs from this week-long workshop. One example is Splash URL (created by team ‘Half-Hour Hacks’), a tool which turns long and complex URLs into much shorter ones, ‘splashing’ them up on screen at conferences to facilitate note-taking. Another example is LazyLecturer (from team ‘Three Lazy Geeks’). This tool eases the collection and aggregation of Internet resources into deliverable learning resources, saving lecturers valuable preparation time.    

Andy McGregor, programme manager within Jisc’s Innovation team, said: “We had several competitive streams threaded through the event, ranging from a light-hearted prize for those delegates entering most into the event’s spirit of community, to the main, highly innovative and technical ‘Developer Decathlon’ prize. The main thing was to get developers trying new things and teaming up with typical users to find innovative solutions to common problems, right here and now at one event.”George Kroner, developer relations engineer for Blackboard, added: “This event is unlike anything I’ve seen before on this scale. To have so many different developer communities cross-pollinating ideas is really powerful. I think we’re going to see many tangible, useful tools coming out of this event.”

Delegate Tony Hirst, from the Open University, was impressed at Jisc’s support for this unusual event, designed for an audience not usually catered for directly.

The Developer Decathlon grand prize winner will be selected following a peer review panel at the end of March. “The first prize of £5k is substantial, but every team participating is likely to have produced a useable, innovative output – and all essentially from one week of networking” explains Andy. “It’s been a microcosm of what a typical funding call might result in. Yes, we certainly hope to work further with this community in future!”

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