I am really pleased to welcome the Oxford code dojo as the latest addition to the Oxford tech scene.

At a Code Dojo, you are presented with an algorithmic problem and are encouraged to solve it in the most efficient way possible – stretching possibly atrophied puzzle solving muscles in the mean time.

It is also a good excuse to do a bit of networking with the other techs in your local area.

Thanks to Matty and Oleg for arranging such a stimulating event, looking forward to the next one!

Image “Dojo” by Fighter-arts

The day began (albeit a little bit late) at the young but fantastic Oxford Geek Jam, where we all got together at the Jam factory to hack on some code.

What we were working on this time was an automatic string tagging and contextual linking api for arbitrary strings. I’m sure one of the other guys could provide a link for this!

I left the code jam early in order to get to my next commitment of the evening – the #oxtwestival!

Live music, political poetry, auctions and raffles. All good fun, and as I mentioned before all for an excellent cause!

I’m delighted to report that (thanks I hope in part to my rather ad-libed auctioneering attempt ) we broke our target – details to follow I’m sure!

Anyway, I need to head back fixing this blinking migration script, so all I have left to say is a BIG thankyou to everyone who came, performed, tweeted and donated! Because of you some families in Africa will have safe water and sanitation!

Thanks! You’re awesome!

This was a techy event organised by @mattythorne and @loleg at the Jam Factory in Oxford bringing together hackers, ideas people and general interested populous to bash out some ideas and start hacking on some projects.

The group split into two main camps based around a couple of ideas; Oleg wanted to hack on a visual wiki representation, and my off the cuff idea which I’ve been playing on for a little while – the Stalk-O-Matic.

Stalk-O-Matic is a little data mining toy I have had in skunk for a while which uses the Google Social Graph api to aggregate much of the public information available on the internet about you into an easily explorable form. This is done for the purposes of education and illustrates just how public private information is – something that I might talk about at Barcamp Transparency.

Off the back of the Geek Jam I have open sourced the code and have started a Google Code project which I’d be interested in seeing people get involved in – usual “It was a private hack made public so is a total mess” disclaimer applies!

Anyway, I found today both enjoyable and thoroughly useful. I hope that there will be many more events like this in Oxford!