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.

Thanks again David and Aslak.

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.