Through The Looking Glass - My Review Of 2012

So I hear all the cool kids are doing it, so thought I would copy. Welcome to 'Through The Looking Glass 2012', where I will be looking back through my year and reflecting on what I did, and how to do better next year!

Events

I didn't write a post this time last year, but I had ideas of what I wanted to do in 2012. I knew I would not have much money, so no holidays, due to being at University but I really wanted to travel and meet people. So some of the most memorable things I have done this year has been the events I have attended in London.

I went to three Hackathons this year, all in London, 'Hackathon London' was my first ever. A group of us from university came up with the idea for Overheard in a pub the week before the hackathon, when we arrived at MarkoMedia's offices I think we were all quite shocked... it was a massive place full of fun people and great working environments, where we worked for over 48 hours (I had one hour sleep!).

The second hackathon was kindly hosted by no other than Facebook London, which was pretty cool. They had some presentations that explained how the Facebook Open Graph worked and encouraged us to make things with it. We carried on working on Overheard, including integration with Facebook. Of course, one of my plans for the year was to meet people, I met some great members of the Facebook staff (and learned that they own fb.com!).

The third was over at Bloomberg's London offices, which was an incredible place that felt like walking into a bunker of MI6! For two days we hacked and played with helicopters and nerf guns. Although I had planned to help a friend with his project, I didn't do too well with node.js at the time so changed tack at midnight and started work on the facial detection algorithm of my webcam.js library. It was (and still is) very buggy, but I enjoyed it and it was a great use of a hackathon!