Archive for the ‘hacking’ Category



Giving a Little Something Back

by matt

Here at Songkick the developers make heavy use of automated tests to bring you the highest-quality product we know how.

Our tools of choice for this are Cucumber and RSpec, two shining examples of open-source products which we get great pleasure from working with. This week, on a trip to the Agile 2009 conference in Chicago, I had the chance to meet up with Aslak Hellesoy and David Chelimsky, the lead developers of these two tools.

David and Aslak give up a huge amount of their spare time to build these two products, for no financial gain. As a start-up we could not survive without these kinds of efforts, so it was a pleasure to be able to express our thanks in person, in the best way we know how: a delicious bottle of scotch whisky for each of them.

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Thanks again David and Aslak.


Music Hack Day and Songkick’s API

by phil

logoAt Songkick we’ve spent a lot of time gathering data about live music, and now we want to see what you can do with it. Along with several other music companies, we’re taking part in Music Hack Day, taking place over the weekend of July 11th-12th 2009 at the Guardian offices here in London.

Anyone attending the hack day will have exclusive preview access to Songkick’s new API, allowing you to get hold of much of the data available on the website. We’re still finalising the details, but we’ll be making documentation available at http://api.songkick.com/docs/ (now http://developer.songkick.com/) as soon as each feature is completed. On the day we’ll be there to answer any questions and help you build your apps. We’ll also be able to make some changes to the API on the day if there’s something you’d like it to do which we haven’t thought of.

If you want to come along, sign up at the Hack Day registration page - places are very limited, so get in early. You should also drop us a line at musichackday@songkick.com (now support@songkick.com) so we can tell you when documentation is available and provide you with an API key in advance. We’d also love to hear what you want from the API, so if you have any specific feature requests please let us know.

Update: The first set of API features are now available. See the documentation for details.

Update: Documentation is now at http://developer.songkick.com/. Please use support@songkick.com to contact us about API access.