 I'm Gin Llyst and I'm here to talk to you about some aspects of my work with Hackaday, so I don't know, some of you may well be already familiar with Hackaday, so I've got to explain what it is. It's a global news website for the tech hardware hacker and maker community. It's hosted by the commercial arm of WordPress and it's one of their biggest websites in terms of traffic. I don't know the exact figures, but when you consider how many websites WordPress host and how many very influential and very large websites, for Hackaday to be one of the largest ones means it has an enormous amount of traffic. There's something that I didn't quite realise when I started writing for Hackaday. I thought, yay Hackaday, I've read them for years, they're awesome and hey now they want me to write for them, awesome. Then I suddenly realised just how many people read everything I write, which is actually quite scary because if you get something wrong a huge amount of people see your mistakes. I've copied and pasted some of this from Hackaday's about us page and edited it slightly because it sums up the way Hackaday sees itself and it's largely the way I see what I'm writing when I write for them. They say we serve up fresh hacks every day. Now I've put mostly hardware in there because the trouble is to most people with a hack means software. It means some nefarious character who's going to break into your bank account or hack the Pentagon or whatever and to us it's a much more fundamental meaning of working specifically with hardware. Hackaday covers some software stories if they're interesting, but we're more likely to be covering things mechanical or electronic because that's what tends to interest us and our audience. The mission statement that's direct copy and pasted are playful posts of the gold standard of entertainment for engineers and engineering enthusiasts. The key thing there is playful I think because to try to present technical subjects in an entertaining manner. Ultimately if you can't have fun writing this stuff and your readers don't have fun reading it then you've probably become linked in and we'd rather be Hackaday. We're reappropriating the word hack. Now my background, as Laura said, is in electronic publishing. I spent 20 plus years working all the way from the CD-ROM business, computer games, the web, Google, search engine marketing. I ended up at the Oxford dictionaries. I was the tame geek to the dictionary effectively. I wasn't a lexicographer, but I worked alongside the lexicographers on all technical aspects from dealing with their website and quite often advising them when they wanted to know about a tech thing for a definition or something, which is a fascinating and inspirational and vibrant bunch of people to work with, most of English history, classicists, whatever. They didn't think of themselves as scientists, but they were far more rigorous in their science than most people with BSCs. As part of that job, I actually looked into the word hack and haco in the context of our community. It has its origins in the tech model railroad club, which is still going. It's the model railway club at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What it is is a bunch of geeks who run a railway layout. It's actually a very, very large railway layout. It's now controlled by all sorts of computers and things. You can go and see it. I think you can look on their website. They have opening hours. It's funded famously by a Coke machine out in the passage. You can put your dollar in by a Coke from the famous machine and support the genesis of the word hack. For them, back in the 50s, a hack was a creative and inventive use of technology or a piece of mechanical apparatus to do something that wasn't originally meant to do. It was a term of praise that is a really cool hack. That's the sense in which we see it. I did some research on the word hack because when I arrived at the press, the dictionary said, I think it appeared in the mid to late 60s, something like an unusually clever user of computers. I can't remember the exact word. I thought, no, it's got to be better than that. Everybody in my community knows it's tech model railroad club. I did a bit of research. I found there's a document written by an early member of the TMRC. In a 1962-odd issue of the tech, which is MIT's newspaper, there's an article talking about some guys using a PDP-1, the Digital Equipments Corporation mini-computer for war dialling, effectively going sequentially through all the numbers in the telephone book for... Is it Cambridge, Massachusetts where it's based? All the numbers in the telephone book looking for numbers that had other computers on the end of, and going in and seeing what they could find, and they got bollocked for it. But it's one of the oldest textual citations of the word hack that we could find. I bunged it off at my lexicographer colleagues, and to be honest, I don't think they found anything earlier. By the way, if any of you know any MIT graduates from that period who either were the people who war dialled with a PDP, or who would know the people who war dialled with a PDP, get them on to me. Hackaday would love to interview them. That's a by the by. Serving a mix of the latest impressive project hacks and other work from our wider community as well as our own original content. That's very important. Our community is one of the broadest and most clever communities on the planet with an astounding array of skills that produces some amazing work. I mean, I'm just an electronic engineer who writes, I have things I do, but they're only a narrow bunch of things I do. And I find among the Hackaday community there are people who can do all sorts of amazing things in the hackspace community, in your local hackspace. You'll find people with skill sets you wouldn't dream of and they'll be plugged into this community. You know them. You know people who know them. You can get hold of them. And so to me, bringing all that together is what keeps me coming down for breakfast every morning. It's what keeps me enthused about what I do because I never know what the next awesome project somebody is going to have made that I will be required to write up will be. And that to me is drinking from the fire hose of tech is something I can't believe I've managed to find somebody to pay me to do. Hackaday writers are a global team. We've got quite a few in the States. We've started in the States. Quite a few of us in Europe. Guy's in India. Guy out in, I believe, Vietnam. Australian. I'm not sure if we've got anybody in South America. We should. And we have one contributor in China. Yet again, they have a huge breadth of experience. Did any of you have a Commodore 8-bit computer in the 1980s or 70s? The guy who probably designed significant chunks of it is a guy called Bill Hurd. He's one of the writers for Hackaday. He's just one example of the kind of people that Hackaday have got on board. And yet again, it's an amazing team to work with. Also, there's a community sister site hackaday.io. Hackaday is owned by a Silicon Valley electronic component sourcing company called Supply Frame. They own several companies. The one that they own Hackaday, they also own a site called Tindi, which you may have seen in this kind of sphere, which is sort of like Etsy for makers. If you make little electronic kits or modules or whatever, you can sell it through Tindi. But they also have run a thing called hackaday.io, which is a community site. The Supply Frame marketeers would probably call its social networking for makers. But it's actually where you can host your project and get your friends to look at it and stuff. So that's very much the other side of the Hackaday community. So that's enough about Hackaday and enough of the commercial. The trouble is, if you've got a tech news site, you've got to keep the posts coming. And doing content is a blooming nightmare, let me tell you. There's probably about 15 or 20 of us all in total. And we have, let me think, probably about 15 or 20 posts a day. I'm one of the editors, I should know this. But a constant supply of good posts has to be lined up and ready to go. We have to have 20 pending posts that we haven't published yet, just to be sure that we're not going to run out of posts. And as a result, we become adept at scouring the internet. We all have our own sources, our own places we look to find the cool stuff as it comes. Probably the most important place is actually our tips line. And if you have made an amazing project which you think, hey, the Hackaday readership would love to see that, submit it to the tips line. We pick stuff to write because it's the stuff that interests us. We figure that if we go, wow, that's really cool, then so also will our readership. Occasionally we get it wrong, we get the dreaded not a hack comment. But there's always going to be some type of us who's going to get annoyed and sort of say, well, Hackaday isn't what it used to be back in the day. But the fact is we look at it as well if there's one reader who is upset because basically they didn't write it, then I'll go with the 100,000 readers who thought it was an excellent post myself. So occasionally, though, the global Hackspace community lets us down. After the American election, for instance, it's like they all went into shock. And there was about three weeks during which nobody produced anything. There was nothing decent coming through on the tips line. We're all tearing out our head, desperately looking, scaring the Hackspaces of the world, looking for things. So when there's nothing on the tips line, it does happen from time to time, we start getting creative. We start looking at other online sources. So myself, I will have a sort of regular trawl through quite a few amateur radio blogs, Raspberry Pi blogs, Arduino blogs, Hacker News, if you're familiar with that. When I'm really desperate, I've got a list of every English language Hackspace in the world's website, and I go through them one by one by one by one to find their latest blog post. And as somebody who's been a director of a Hackspace, I know how difficult it is to keep a Hackspace website updated, but it always makes me feel quite good because most of their websites are less updated than Oxford Hackspaces is, which makes me feel quite good. And then hunches and other random thoughts. Just occasionally inspiration comes to you for a post. I had that quite recently. Now, I hope I'm not revealing something that isn't published yet, but it's one of those moments when you're in the bath and you think, hey, I wonder what happened to that. A few years ago, there was a post, a project doing the round. Somebody was remanufacturing the Ford Model A engine from the 1920s, a side valve engine from a quite early primitive motor car, and they were re-engineering it with modern metallurgy, proper bearings, a five bearing crank and a better cooling system. And it was a fantastic project. It was one of those things like, wow, I can't wait to see that. And of course, one doesn't think about these projects. One forgets about them. I was just sitting in the bath and suddenly I thought, what happened to that? And so went off, found it. Unfortunately, it's stalled because they couldn't find a foundry to do it. And so I wrote it off Hackaday and said, does anybody in the Hackaday community know a foundry who could help? Because if any community will know somebody in a foundry, it's a Hackaday community. So wherever you can think of cool stuff is where we try to find articles. And sometimes it can be an absolute struggle. Occasionally, we have desperate sort of, oh no, we've got four posts left and we've got two days to schedule. Let's desperately try to read it. Hopefully it hasn't got to the point at which that's become obvious to the readers yet. But I'm trying to get across the struggle that faces any content-driven news source. You have to keep the news coming. We haven't also got to the point where we're making up the news or going out there to make the news happen. You'll never be really desperate with that. The other side of it, I should say the daily posts, there are eight or nine, ten of them a day and they are about 200, 250 words long. They normally have a description of whatever it is, something along the lines of, wow, so and so it. This Hackspace or whatever has done this amazing hack and it's cool stuff and this is how we think it works and here's a video and here's a link to it. 200, 250 words. We're not giving them a full write-up. We're saying go and read their write-up. The other side of it is original content posts. These are the editorial side of Hackaday. Normally there is, I believe, one or maybe two of those a day. They are either medium length, sort of 500 to 1,000 words, give or take, or long OC, which is over 1,000, can be as much as 2,000. To me they are the fun part. Sometimes one's creative juices dries up and can't think of what the hell do I put in the OCs that I've got to do this month because everything that interests you at the time, you've written that and you're desperate and I think what can I write about. But usually it's personal interests. For instance, I grew up in a farm so if you read Hackaday you'll have probably noticed one or two posts about tractors and implements and things. You'll have noticed one or two posts about amateur radio from me or even one or two about the running of a Hackspace which always gets me into trouble with Oxford Hackspace because they're always convinced it's about them. I've got a plan for this. I live roughly half-odd in Oxford, Milne Keans and I'm going to join Milne Keans Hackspace because then I have plausible deniability. So when I write about Hackspace politics I can say, oh no, it's about MK to the Oxford people and say it's about Oxford to the MK people. It's plausible deniability, I love it. We do reviews. We don't do paid reviews. If you want free stuff, set up a site, do reviews. Be a shameless reviewer of anything. All sorts of Chinese 3D printer companies and Banggood and Amazon sellers and what will send you shiny crap. Sorry, shiny, worthy, wonderful stuff which you're going to say is awesome. You will sit and you'll write a glowing review about how wonderful it is and they'll send you more stuff. There are a lot of science that do that. A few of them are straight up about saying so and so sent to me this. Most of them aren't. Now I want to make this as clear as I possibly can that if you see a review on Hackadates because we bought it, I believe occasionally my colleague Brian is sent pre-manufacture 3D printers that are exciting for I believe he had a delta 3D printer from one of the manufacturers that was very keenly awaited but when he did that review I believe that he made it excruciatingly clear this is a printer that's not on the market yet. We were sent it as a pre-manufacturing thing by the manufacturer. This is not a unbiased review. We were sent this to have a look at it. So if you see a review and it's just a review of a product it's because we bought it. My most recent review was a toy. It's actually a soldering iron. A USB soldering iron. A wonderful 8 watt USB soldering iron that cost me the Prince this summer £3.68 from Banggood. It's one of those things where it pops up when you're making a Banggood order and you think, just how crap can they be and it's only three quids. So I put it on there thinking I'm going to review that. As it turns out it's a tiny little soldering iron that goes almost nothing and gets hot enough to sold a tiny surface mount things and for surface mount things it's quite good. So I'm pleased that I did that review but even for a £3.60 soldering iron trust me we paid for it. In fact I paid for it. I'm not going to bother claiming it back from Hackaday. Matters are rising. If something comes in the news that needs a piece of comment. So for instance I've written quite a few and my colleagues have written quite a few of those. The ones I've written have been often about multi-rotors, drones. You'll see a lot of drone coverage in the paper I'll probably return to that in a bit but it's when you're responding to a news thing with look the news isn't giving a good tech angle on this and we feel that it needs somebody who actually knows what they're talking about to talk about it. Conventions and camps if you are familiar with the Hack Space Hacker Maker community you'll find, well you're at an event of course, you'll find a lot of Hacker Maker camps Hackaday and supply run their own events, they've got one in London in the middle of the month coming up I was at the Sharr Hacker camp in the Netherlands beginning of August. Was anybody else here at Sharr? Nobody. Imagine a music festival like Glastonbury or similar only without the music because that would get in the way of the fun and every structure on the site from the smallest tent the largest marquee having power and 100 gigabit internet access and you've got the continent's Hack Spaces turning up with all their cool stuff showing it off and socialising and it is an unrivaled atmosphere that every time I go to one of these Hacker camps I just walk around in the dark with the lasers and the lights and the rave music and the smoke with a beer in my hand and just drink it all in and it's one of the cool things now working for Hackaday I find people actually seek me out to show me stuff I don't even have to go and find it. The next such event if I've enthused you about Hacker camps is I think called EMF camp it's the end of August next year and it's in the UK so I could commend that as an aside and editorial suggestions occasionally my editor will say I think you should write about this because I grew up in a farm he's recently come up and asked me I think you should write about this aspect of actually an aspect of technology as it applies to growing stuff it's addressing the issue of how most people are divorced from the land I don't have any idea how technology or how the food they eat is made that's a typical example of an editorial suggestion you'll probably see it at some point in the next month or so for me and then finally rants are great because you can just let it go I'll try to think of a recent rant I did I did a rant about the lack of a decent DC power connector because I find it completely odd that when I buy a 12V appliance it comes with a car cigarette lighter plug on it who if they were designing a DC electrical outlet would come up with the car cigarette lighter plug and so I wrote a significantly long rant on that particular subject and you know when you are when you've hit the mark with a hackaday piece because you can look at the number of comments it generated and that one generated 189 comments the day leaves you lucky if you get 20 a good original content editorial piece you get 50, 60, 70 but that one the comments just kept on coming and coming I obviously touched a raw nerve among my fellow engineers anyway let's move on I'm going to look at a couple of original content in detail just to give you the breadth of the stuff the kind of stuff we do this is a piece I wrote last year and it's actually a very journalistic rather than technical piece and it's a piece I'm quite proud of because I feel it really touched on an issue you'll see in the newspapers a lot and the subject is multi-rotors drones and their oft reported close encounters with aircraft in Oxford Hack Space we've got a young guy called Jared who's been flying drones since he was an early teenager and now does it professionally to be fair to me he does it to a very very high standard and he was sitting there getting very very very irate one day when I came in there because he'd read the newspaper reports about a drone strike and there'd actually been a proven strike between a drone and a British Airways I believe it was a jet airliner on the approach to Heathrow and two days later they actually found and they've approved what it was of hit the aircraft and it turned out to a plastic bag and he was ranting and raving at this because drones were always fingered to be the wrong thing and I'm not a multi-rotor flyer I find them very impressive pieces of kit but I don't own one never flown one myself it is part of Hack Space culture I've been into more than one space and there's been a little more drone flying around your head and landing on your hand and what have you but I just thought well this is interesting there's a story here so what I did was I went away and found a year's worth of civil aviation authority incident reports and went through and analysed them and I was interested by Jared's point that there were all these reports and in none of the cases there'd only be actually turned up with a provable drone and it was quite interesting to read them all because they were generally at very high altitude the aircraft were normally flying at very high speed and the drones were often flying at even higher speed there was one in particular it was coming out of standstead and I cannot remember the airline involved but the thing was flying at about 350 miles an hour and it was at quite a few thousand feet about 10,000 feet and the drone comes into it from one o'clock about there in front of the aircraft at very high speed and then executed a 180 degree turn almost 180 degree turn and then flies off at a similarly high speed at about 2 o'clock so about over there now if you just think about that for a minute I'm not even sure that a high spec military aircraft can do that manoeuvre even if it was flown by the top test pilot you'd need to be able to do max speeds I don't know if you're familiar with drones but they're little electrically driven things from China with four little motors and little propellers they're very cool and they can do some amazing things but they can't fly at max speeds they can't fly at 10,000 feet and they certainly can't approach jet airliners to do 180 degree turn and run away that was the most impressively bad example and this piece went through report by report by report and there is nobody who wants irresponsible drone pilots to be locked up in the key thrown away than me because it brings a bad reputation on to pretty much the whole of the sort of hacker and maker movement when our members get associated with that but I came away from finding very few where even possible it could have been a drone and I came away thinking that it had it was very irresponsible that not only were the pilots reporting them all as drones but the newspapers were reporting them all as drones so I came away quite proud of this particular piece then another piece I want to show you April Fool's Day if any of you are familiar with the audiophile hi-fi business there's a whole world of hi-fi juju, silly things that you stick on your hi-fi make it sound better I went away, combed the internet for the worst examples of bad hi-fi journalism cut and pasted them all together edited them together and made a hackaday sticker like that or like the one you can see on my laptop at the end I have got some hackaday stickers unfortunately I haven't got any of those nice ones if you want one a hackaday sticker into a hi-fi accessory that's an example of the completely opposite side of the kind of work we do for hackaday but I'm running out of time that's unfortunate isn't it right how to get your piece noticed by hackaday first of all we're not your marketing department if you have a commercial product that you're trying to push on Kickstarter I'm sorry gun pay somebody we get bombarded with the next big thing Kickstarter's or people who've hired a Kickstarter agent to push them or whatever and try to get us to believe that it's a genuine hack when it isn't it's just something they've found in Shenzhen sorry we're not going to do that we have integrity not everybody knows everything you do the number of write ups that assume the person is already a nuclear physicist are astounding er we have to understand it ourselves and we have our own expertise but we're not experts in everything our readers have to understand it from what we've told them and if it's assumes a very high level of knowledge already then we can't help better to write in a verbose manner than write too little we have to have something to work us throw us a bone please and YouTube everybody thinks that a 30 second badly shot shaky YouTube video is better than a syntax that actually explains matters please just have a video video is great but also give us a write up spare a thought for the image editor please resolution give us lots of resolution if all your images are 320 by 240 sorry 1996 called they want their images back also have a look at the sites that you're aiming for look at the image sizes they use and put up images accordingly in Hackaday's case it's an 800 by 250 letter box and a 600 by 600 square that make images that will fit nicely within those boundaries other sites similar they will have their own things get to know the sites in question look at the images they require and help them if you help them they will help you grammar useful in all sorts of places I used to work for the Oxford dictionaries we get people right stuff if English isn't their first language fair enough English isn't their first language we understand that but if you want our readers to engage with you write as well as you can it's probably the best way to put it and don't make me come in the way if I go to a write-up I don't want to then have to comb through 20 other sites to get the information put all the information in one place please anyway so if any of you want to write for Hackaday we are actually quite often hiring recently a couple of weeks ago Mike put up a we're hiring post it happens every six to eight months so we have a bit of a turn over writers decide whether they get a permy job or they haven't got the time or whatever and so we're quite often recruiting generally they want to see well they specify a sample piece write a sample piece about something which basically if you read Hackaday you'll know roughly what a daily piece is about 250 words a couple of images but also have a portfolio if you have a tech blog if you want to write for Hackaday start a little tech blog of yourself so that you can send something to Mike and he can say wow this person can write in my case I was lucky when I worked for the dictionary I wrote a whole load of stuff for the Oxford dictionaries blog and that along with being the only electronic engineer on the planet with Oxford dictionaries trains literacy meant that he practically bit my hand off so that's it I'm Jenny List you can find my Hackaday stuff there you can find my Twitter stuff there would any of you like to know anything about Hackaday the general hack space world any of the stuff that I've talked about just this