Monthly Archives: October 2015

coding for christ

800 Christian developers and designers in one global hackathon

hackathon

This past weekend, 800 or so Christian developers, designers, entrepreneurs and technology fans gathered in 13 separate cities around the world for the Code for the Kingdom global hackathon.

Here in London we had about 120 or so folks gathered, and 18 separate projects – both ones aimed at helping Christians in their walk with God, and ones aimed at serving the wider world:

  • Flee! – a low-touch accountability app that pings you appropriate Bible verses when it spots you typing inappropriate web URLs
  • My refuge – “AirBnB for refugees”
  • Let’s pray for… – a prototype for a fantastic social prayer app, that I really hope comes to life soon!
  • Homely – a service to help people give financial aid to homeless people
  • B40 – helping teens pray intensively for breakthrough over 40 days
  • Adventure – an evangelistic Christmas treasure hunt
  • Tearfund Disaster Response – a practical tool to help responses to emergency situations
  • Peri – find the Christians that live and work nearby
  • Biybl – “Bible In Your Best Language”, a simple tool to help international visitors to your church follow the Bible readings
  • SeedBox – Digital Asset Management for church sermon videos / audio etc
  • LazyWorship – automatically display the correct verse/chorus on your projector as the software identifies the audio
  • Good News – a place to champion the good things that happen
  • Mentorship – a place for younger Christians to find people to mentor them, and vice versa
  • Where’s the meaning? – helping businesses avoid ambiguity in communication
  • Power of prayer – a simple SMS based service to help people pray
  • Worship helper – a quick way for band members to communicate key signature, tempo, etc
  • Verse of the day – Microsoft Band app to give you a verse each day
  • PrayerMate – simplifying and overhauling my prayer app

It was a brilliantly encouraging weekend, so fantastic to see people collaborating together to build genuinely useful things. The food was great, the fellowship was great, the projects were great.

Here’s a video that Dan Rackham put together to give you a flavour of our London event:

Bring on Code for the Kingdom 2016!

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Countin’

Have you ever had that thing where you’re taking tea and coffee orders after a Bible study, and before you know it you’re running out of fingers trying to keep tabs of decaf coffee and peppermint tea and normal coffee and water and… well, it’s hard work, isn’t it?

I’d like to commend you a beautifully simple little iOS app that’s available for free on iPhone: Countin’. It gives you a grid of customisable counters that simply count up or down as you tap them. Simple!

It’s by a young man called Matthew Spear who I had the privilege of hanging out with at the Code for the Kingdom hackathon last weekend, and I know he’d be really chuffed if a few people downloaded it (and if you were feeling really generous you’d send a couple of quid his way by hitting the In-App Purchase – unlocking various colour options and feel-good vibes!)

countin

Get Countin’ here.