Yesterday and today, staff at the Guardian have been having a get together that sums up the kind of thing the organisation is really good at.

The Guardian Hack Day is about getting its developers in a room and getting them to build stuff, with helpful advice from staff from editorial, commercial, or anywhere I think.

Information architect Martin Belam probably describes it better:

I suppose we should explain a bit more about what a “hack day” is at the Guardian. Essentially for two working days our tech team puts aside their normal work, and gets to work on a project of their own choosing. Sometimes they will work as teams, sometimes as individuals. (And sometimes I think they have been secretly coding the things for months in advance anyway). Other people, like the design and UX team, and commercial & editorial staff, are also encouraged to take part if they can spare the time.

This is certainly not the first hack day, but they are liveblogging this one, and it makes for interesting reading. It is coming to a close now, I got sidetracked away from posting something about it yesterday, but you can still follow the day two liveblog here, and you can look back on the goings on from yesterday here.

A nice hack from someone outside the Guardian also appeared today: http://latertodayguardian.appspot.com/

Created by Chris Thorpe, who used to work for the Guardian’s Open API Platform team, it uses a Guardian JSON feed to turn the news organisation’s new experimental open newslist into a great looking column-based page, with links to reporters’ Twitter accounts and a Guardian API search to try and match the newslist to published stories.