I don't use this blog much (as you can probably tell by the default Squarespace theme and the distinct lack of many posts), but I thought this deserved more than just a couple of tweets.

Firstly, to the few of you reading this who don't already know: London Real-Time was a hackathon organised by GoSquared (and for the most part masterminded by Chris Leydon) in partnership with Pusher, Twilio, Geckoboard, RabbitMQ, and Amazon Web Services. Many, many developers (about 130 or so, all told) descended on our office and hacked away for a weekend on a load of really awesome projects using the various APIs available. We all got very little sleep, emotions were running wild (I for one felt like throttling Chris at one point, and I'm sure he wanted to do something equally evil to me), but in all it was a thoroughly enjoyable and successful weekend. All of the hacks produced were thoroughly impressive (even the ones that didn't quite work), and everyone seemed to have a great time. And we gave out some iPads and AWS credit too, to the hacks we thought were even more seriously awesome than the rest.

Anyway, I'm just writing this to point out that there are several people without whom the whole thing really wouldn't have happened or gone anywhere nearly as smoothly. People who really haven't been mentioned. So I'd just like to put it on record just how grateful we are to all of them. I apologise in advance for my poor grammar — despite ten hours' sleep last night I'm not entirely sure I've recovered yet!

So, in no particular order:

Olly Newport: (whom I've just realised I'm not following yet on twitter — oops!) I suppose Olly doesn't quite count as unsung because his name's on the official videos, but I don't think people realise how much he's actually done. Basically he shot and edited all of our official video (see below) over the whole weekend, and just didn't sleep at all for the first two days. I'm pretty sure he lasted the longest out of anybody before finally giving in to sleep (i.e. was coerced by Chris on the grounds of Health and Safety, or something like that) at 3am on Sunday. That first video was all cut together at about 4am on Saturday and, well, it's pretty damn amazing. Especially as that was on no sleep at all and edited entirely in situ. And I don't know for certain, but I wouldn't be surprised if I found out that he's back to work after very very little sleep (it's Monday now) and editing the footage from Sunday. Though I hope not — he should be getting some sleep! (Edit: told you! He's back at it!)

Tom O'Connor: if you were there on Friday evening, you were probably getting thoroughly annoyed at how terrible our WiFi was being. Tom had just come along to hack, but spent ages on Friday evening and Saturday morning helping us sort it all out and get it working. Plus he lugged a load of his own heavy routing kit across London to beef up our setup and get it working. Without him, the wireless would have stayed in the same state it was on Friday, and we'd have had a pretty terrible wekeend. Plus, as part of his hack he set up the real-time webcam feed we used on our hacks blog (unfortunately offline now as we've dismantled everything) — if we're actually using your hack halfway into the hackathon it must be good!

Visual Idiot: just quickly on the note of the hacks blog: Idiot (or do I refer to him as Visual?) managed to very quickly, and at very short notice, throw together the Wordpress theme for the blog. It may look fairly simple, but it still took a fair amount of effort on his part. Which meant he didn't have time to work on real-time kittens or make a really silly tech-based pun on twitter. Must've been agony.

Aaron Parker: Aaron's not actually officially on the GoSquared team, but he's done a lot of work with and for us over the last few years (he's done most of the work on our plugins). I'm pretty sure he got the least sleep out of anyone over the whole weekend (probably less than two hours between Friday morning and Sunday evening). Despite not being asked to, he turned up on Friday morning (after lugging a massive bag of his own camera kit across London) and proceeded to help us out with setting everything up and all the myriad other jobs that needed doing for the whole weekend.

Alex Brooks and Mike Horseman: Neither Alex nor Mike were under any obligation to help us out, but nontheless we enticed them with the prospect of free beer and they both helped out with manning the bar and other odd jobs that needed doing on Friday evening.

And last but by no means least, all the other members of the GoSquared team who helped out but didn't get as much limelight as the others: Saul Cullen, Jack Kingston, Simon McManus (plus Harry!), Tim Parker, Simon Tabor, and Natalie Zabranova. These guys have all put in a huge amount of effort over the course of the last week and over the weekend in the process of setting up, ensuring everything went smoothly, and clearing up afterwards. They've been manning the bar, managing the BBQ, sitting downstairs in the cold by the door, clearing up rubbish and dealing with a particularly grim blocked loo (which, by the way, has its own twitter account now).

It is almost certain that I've forgotten somebody here, so if that's the case, then I'm sorry! So many people have helped us out in so many ways it's just too hard to keep track of them all!

As a final shout out, I'd also like to thank everyone at all the other companies in White Bear Yard for their cooperation and for putting up with us while we were running around like headless chickens on Friday (while they were trying to work), and for tolerating everything we didn't manage to get absolutely back to normal for when they turned up to work this morning. Especially Susy Pote, our office manager, for all her help, for being on-call all the time in case we broke anything or set the place on fire or something (neither of which happened, thankfully), and for dealing with the phone calls from our terrible neighbour who likes to find any excuse to complain about the noise, the lights, the BBQ or anything.

And now onto the videos. Which, as I said before and for the sake of it I'll reiterate here, were entirely shot and almost entirely cut together on zero sleep by Olly. I apologise in advance for the name of the hack in the second video (it's a just little bit rude). That's what tired developers do.