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On August 2-6 2010 I was lucky enough to participate in a great event for young developers called Young Rewired State. The event is the smaller sibling of the Rewired State week-long events and ‘Hack Days’, where developers get together and write innovative apps using data provided by the Government – often in ways that were not previously imagined or where the provided data was in a format unfriendly to development use.

Young Rewired State is slightly different in that the developers are all 15-18 years old, gather in centres around the country (this time there were centres in London, Brighton, Manchester and Norwich) and have a week to work on their projects. Collaborating in groups or developing alone, there was also help from professional developers as mentors. Sadly I couldn’t afford the travel costs into London for the whole week, but I was given a chance to participate anyway, working from home and just going in for the presentation event at the end of the week. James Cunningham also missed out on the mentoring, working in Dundee, but that didn’t stop him from writing a truly amazing project.

Faced with the question of what to do for a project, I wanted to incorporate real life data into a game style simulation. However, this didn’t seem very practical, so eventually I wrote a postcode comparison web tool with PHP  – enter two postcodes and it will give you a table of results comparing the two areas in a number of different categories. As each category is output in a similar way, I separated the logic for input and output from the category logic, which allowed me to easily add and remove collections of categories by adding and removing PHP classes. Some of the categories that I implemented included ADSL and Cable Broadband availability, the number of materials able to be recycled locally, the crime level compared with the national average and the Digital Switchover date.

Then, on Friday, everyone assembled in London for the presentation day, where everyone gave a short talk about their project, and, technology permitting, a short demonstration. The quality of the products was amazing; everybody had clearly put a lot of effort into polishing their projects, with lovely CSS designs everywhere you looked, which was one reason that I was apprehensive when taking to the stage. A minute long delay while attempting to get the projector to work didn’t help either.

Projects included UniSearch – a search engine for university courses, NatuSearch (a natural-syntax database search engine) by the aforementioned Mr Cunningham, an endless number of HTML5 spinners by the YRS Manchester team (who also contributed a rap!) and Isabell Long’s GovSpark site tracking government energy usage.

Overall, it was a very enjoyable experience which taught me a valuable lesson – just because you’re at home doesn’t mean you can slack off working!

An in-depth, official writeup by the wonderful people who made everything happen can be found here.