Hackdiary

I’ve returned to the working world from sabbatical and now it’s a big day. I’ve been looking forward to this all year.

This afternoon I flipped the switch on the BBC Programme Catalogue and let everyone in. Stop reading this now and get in there.

I’m going to have a fun afternoon monitoring the server for load, but I know that lots of people are going to have a great deal more fun looking through the catalogue. The depth and quality of this unique library of information is quite stunning. It gets better every day, as it receives nightly updates from the master database inside the BBC. I was particularly pleased to discover that even my dad has a listing: he appeared on the local news as a council spokesman during the UK BSE crisis. As one of our early-access guinea pigs said, “this is as addictive as Google Earth for anyone interested in UK television and radio.”

If you’re interested in the technical details behind the site, I’ll be speaking at the RailsConf and XTech conferences later this year about how Ruby on Rails made this one of the smoothest software development projects I’ve ever worked on. I doff my cap to my co-conspirators: Tom Loosemore, Julie Rowbotham, Ben Hammersley, Adam Lee, and the wonderful librarians and techies who toil ceaselessly in the BBC’s archive.

Let me know what you think.