It been a long week at work after Mashed at the weekend. Things were a bit less chaotic in Alexandra Palace this year and from a personal perspective they almost couldn’t have been more different.

In a complete turn around from last year, when I built something to give my employer a kick, this year I was able to bring some stuff along, give a talk and help others with their hacks.

In an I think rather special achievement we managed to get all of the bits that make up BBC Programmes running on EC2 and made them available to everyone for the weekend. And when I say all the bits, I mean all of them – the backend metadata store (PIPs), the metadata editor used by production teams (PIT) and the bit that publishes the pages (Dynpub). This was all filled with full production data up to the day before.

Thanks to Nick and Patrick from Audio & Music Interactive we also had nine months of radio playout data as segments in PIPs, matched to the production data, all with MusicBrainz IDs. This was used by a couple of teams (BYK and CRSS) to recommend BBC Radio programmes from Last.fm profiles.

Other favourites included Anthony McKale from BBC Scotland and his BBC Super Search, a fast, fluid search built in Flash for iPlayer and the whole of bbc.co.uk and Matthew Somerville‘s Who Said… which took the subtitles from last series of Doctor Who and showed graphs of how frequently certain words occurred, where they appeared on screen and a Wordle cloud of words from each episode.

One hack I’ll definitely be using regularly is opening-times.co.uk, which tells you whether the shops around you are open. It’s also the first application that will get me using Fire Eagle.

It was also nice to get PIPs mentioned in the Guardian.

All in all it was a great weekend. Thanks to the guys at BBC Backstage for all their effort and hard work in making it happen.