Archive for the ‘tech/geek’ 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.

Picture 1

Thanks again David and Aslak.


Let’s Talk!

by craig t mackenzie

One of the great things about the Songkick community is that you guys are very vocal. You keep us honest and tell us when something’s not right, and we love it.

We get a lot of feedback from our users, and after launch this increased hugely, putting more strain on our lovely Emily, who reads and responds to all you guys. So to make life easier for you and her, we’ve been busy working on 2 features that make having a conversation better.

First up is Get Satisfaction. It’s a community support website that has all the tools we need to listen to your ideas and help you with your problems.

We’re huge fans of Get Satisfaction, and decided to move our general feedback, bug reporting, and FAQ’s over there. You can check this out by clicking the “We love feedback” link in the top of every page.

It’s proven popular so far, and there’s some really interesting ideas you guys are voicing, so don’t be shy, head over there now!

The next feature we launched, to compliment our new feedback forum is a re-designed “flag a problem” widget.

This is a pretty big one, as a lot of the feedback we get is in regards to incorrect data, misspellings, and such. We wanted to streamline the process of reporting data quality issues, so we can tackle and fix them more quickly.

So next time you see something a bit funky or just down right wrong, hit the link and we’ll know about it in next to no time.


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.


Wednesday 3rd June: slake your thirst with Topspin and Songkick

by pete

I’m happy to say our great friends at Topspin Media are in town and we’re co-hosting an informal meetup in east London with them on Wednesday.

We’ll be at Electricity Showrooms from 7:30pm on Wednesday evening. There’ll be summer eve relaxation, music- and tech-related philosophising, and fine company.

(picture by fabbio on Flickr, some rights reserved)

Topspin’s CEO Ian Rogers has beaten us to it and has created a Facebook event for the meetup, so RSVP and then (as Ian puts it) “please forward the invite to any London friends you think may be interested/ing!”

Come along if you can make it!

Team Songkick


Hacker meetup #2 – photos

by ian

Every month we host a hacker meetup at our office in London.

Last summer we took part in Y Combinator – an incubator for very early stage start-ups. It was an incredible experience – we moved to Boston for 3 months and spent a summer working crazy hours hacking up our first prototype of Songkick. We were doing this alongside 18 other start-ups and the atmosphere and cameraderie was incredible.

I’d recommend the experience to anyone interested in starting a web based company, do get in touch with me if you’re interested and I’ll tell you more.

One of the best things about Y Combinator were the weekly dinners where all the start-ups would meet up and talk about what they’d been working on that week. It was a very developer focused group (around 95% of the founders were hackers) so it was an ideal environment to get feedback on your new code and ideas.

When we came back to London we missed the atmosphere at those dinners so decided to try to replicate it.

Once a month a group of hackers meet up at our office and then go for dinner somewhere cheap nearby. It’s a great place to get feedback on ideas and meet like-minded people. This month was the second meetup we’ve done and attendance was way higher than we expected – around 45 hackers turned up to watch demos and discuss ideas. This month the demos were really varied with:

- Dennis Furey who presented Ursala, a new functional programming language he is developing

- Mark Kinsey who demoed a cool stealth mobile app for restaurants and bars – and is looking for a technical co-founder

- The brothers Moore who demoed Mibbit their online IRC client (they currenly handle 2.5M lines of chat a day…)

- Daniel Todd who showed off his personal timeline app Timetoast (just launched!)

          Here are some photos from the demos:

          demo1

          demo2

          demo3

          If any UK based hackers are reading this join the Hacker Meetup Facebook group here and come along to the next one! It’ll be on Friday 23rd May at 7pm.