Last weekend I attended an event called Social Innovation Camp. The premise of the event is to take 6 worthy projects from the local community then get a load of developers, designers and and marketers together to quickly create the project over the weekend.

I was quite worried that I wasn’t good enough to take part in the weekend so to get my confidence up I read the whole of the Pragmatic Programmers Agile Rails book and did a few quick web apps. At the same time I got a copy of RubyMine installed and learnt all the shortcuts. It really is a fantastic bit of kit.

Kevin McDonagh had previously told me about sicamp, but unfortunately he could not make it due to his unyielding love of dance music (he was at Sonar in Barcelona). I had a quick look over the back of the envelope ideas and decided that I would be best served helping out with the “Changing Places” idea. This idea was to make a user maintainable Google Map of all the accessible toilets in the UK. This was a very similar domain to the Glasgow Green Map which I had previously worked on and the idea owner, Rosie McIntosh from ENABLE Scotland, was very passionate about the project.

The weekend kicked off on Friday night where there was a meet and greet session. As I live in Glasgow I agreed to let 2 strangers stay over who were also going to sicamp. This night was a networking extravaganza! I met a guy who had been on Dragon’s Den and actually got funding as well as many other developers who I haven’t seen at any other events I go to.

Saturday kicked off early with enormous croissants and juice. I setup in our allotted room at Glasgow Caledonian University and read over what we needed to do. A few other people turned up who also were also excited about the idea: @rohan_london and Claire Medcalf from the School of Everything). At first we decided to do all public toilets as well as disabled and accessible ones. We then found the rather excellently named site sitorsquat.com which already did this. Given this revelation we decided it would be best to focus on accessible toilets and what tourist attractions are nearby. This means we needed name to sum up our site. weedayout.com was born.

I was slightly disheartened at first as I was the only developer on the project. Some of the other projects had over 6 developers. Luckily a Sangeet Gyawali joined us as a designer to polish up the functionality I’d made (i.e. make it so someone other than me could bear to use it!).

We eventually got booted out of the University at 8pm that night and headed along to the CCA on Sauchie Hall street. I’m not sure if the CCA knew what hit them, as suddenly 40 geeks with laptops took up all their floor space. Most folk stayed around for another 3 hours then headed back to prepare for the big presentation day.

Sunday at 2pm was the deadline for getting our sites live and having a presentation available to demo to the rest of the teams and interested members of the public. Rosie and I spoke during our presentation which was met with a great reaction from the delegates. During our Q&A someone pointed out that TomTom’s have a developer API and we could push our data through to them.

The presentations showed that each team had spent a huge amount of effort over the weekend and their enthusiasm made me want to help out on all of the projects after the weekend.

The event was judged by a panel from a diverse range of disciplines such as the National Lottery fund, Local arts as well as a respected freelance programmer. We were lucky enough to be given second place for our efforts which means the project will receive additional help over the next 6 months. I intend to continue working on the website and hopefully get a team interested in Glasgow.

I have to thank the sicamp team for putting on a great event that has left me with a smile on my face every day while remembering this weekend.

Following on from my last 2 tools you need to use: Google Reader and Delicious. There is a massively hyped tool which I can heartedly recommend.

Twitter is an opt-in version of IRC. Think about that for a second. Now imagine the IRC chat room has people you respect (for me Charlie Brooker, Stephen Fry and Martin Fowler), and you can hear their thoughts. If there’s anything we have learnt about the Internet over the last 2 years it’s that stalking is at an all time high. It’s also becoming mainstream.

I was very sceptical about Twitter. Seeing it as a way for people I sort of know spamming me with fascinating anecdotes about getting pished with their mates the other night. But it’s quite simple, just keep it professional and only listen to people you know and/or respect. If your life is all about High School Musical then you can listen to the ramblings of the stars from the show. If you are deeply into software development, then all of your heroes are already on board.

I think to get the most out of Twitter you need to either have the iPhone/Android/Blackberry application, or not have it unblocked at your work. But it really is a genuinely interesting new source of information I check multiple times a day along with my SMS, email and rss feeds. I feel more connected and as the circulation figures for gossip magazines will tell you, people love being a little too intimate.

Feel free to follow me!

This week has been a great week for hearing about new tech. On Tuesday I did a presentation at work about Hudson and Sonar. Hudson is a CI server and Sonar is a great way to track metrics on your codebase.

On Wednesday I went along to the Java User Group Scotland and checked out a great talk done by Selcuk Bozdag on Flex development. Flex allows you to make pretty cool Flash based applications which can talk to remote services. It isn’t tied to Java like I originally thought. There’s an awful lot of out of the box charting and video tools which seem useful.

On Saturday I went along to the Microsoft sponsored Developer Day event. They had 4 different tracts offering mainly .NET and MS SQL Server talks. I enjoyed listening to the Virtulisation and Ruby on .NET talks especially. I then managed to find some Perl/Flex developers I could talk loudly about the evil that is IE6 to restore the balance.

While at the conference I was approached by some guys from the disposable memory project who were at my talk the previous week at the Glasgow Techmeetup. They handed me a modded film based camera with instructions to hand it to someone else after a single usage and after all the exposures were used the last person would hand it back to someone else. Hopefully I’ll get to see what this led to!

Just a quick note to say that the Techmeetup group, which is well established in Edinburgh already, are meeting in Glasgow tonight and I think Kevin and I will be doing out Greenmap talk. I think this could be the first meeting in Glasgow too. About 70 folk turn up for the Edinburgh one so it should be good.

7pm in Room M329, James Weir Building, 75 Montrose Street, Glasgow.

Recently I’ve became fascinated by Whisky. Last year I went on a micro-brewery tour at West in Glasgow. In that case it’s beer, but Whisky is distilled beer so it’s the same ingredients and they share part of the same process. On my recent trip to Skye I went around the Talisker distillery and was very taken by the Whisky experience.

The Whisky flavour chart (PDF) was what really appealed to the inner information geek within me. As soon as you can identify the flavour types along with their associated areas you get a much better picture of the brands on offer.

This set me off on a mission to experience all the different tastes that this nation provides. It really is a crime that my previous experience was with blended whiskies intended for cocktails!

I’ve collated information I’ve found online and created a whisky tasting guide.