Hack Day looms
Ever since the first Hack Day at Yahoo!, I’ve been wanting to participate. There’s been one or two since the first one and I haven’t participated in them. Why? Well, because I have a day job. But good news is just around the corner. Thursday is the next company Hack Day and yours truly will be right in the thick of it. I’ve cleared a couple of hours of work time to work on my hack(s) (still not 100% sure on what I’m doing, but I have a couple of ideas) and I’ve set up my commute schedule to allow me to be down for the 24 hour hacking session (noon Thursday to noon Friday). So with new MacBook in hand, next week I hack.
Hack Day at Yahoo! has really been dominated by the search folks. That’s not really surprising because they’re the ones who originally put it together. But I think this time we’ll see a lot more involvement from other teams. I already know of at least 1 other person who will be presenting a demo from the mail team. It should be really cool to see the other groups starting to get involved. I think it should generate plenty of new things that actually make their way to the users (several hacks from past hack days are in production now).
On a related topic, I think I already have enough ideas to keep me busy with this Hack Day. However, I’ve been kicking around the idea of taking suggestions from users. I’m not sure how well it would go or if someone within Yahoo! would cry foul, but it might be kind of fun. Imagine, as a user, if you had access to 1 engineer for an entire day. What would you build? Keep in mind it can’t be some huge feature. It would have to be something that could be completed to demo-worthy status within 24 hours (possibly less, I might crash hard at the end so I wouldn’t count on the last 4 hours being quality hours). And, of course, there’s no guarantee that anything shown at Hack Day will ever be seen outside of Yahoo!. Food for thought for the next Hack Day.
June 11th, 2006 at 11:24 am
I’m looking forward to seeing what you have cooking, and I’m really excited about all the groups outside of Search participating. I really have no idea what to expect (and that’s the fun part).
I spent this weekend playing around with a sound level meter to record audience noise for the hacks. The past few Hack Days have been pretty noisy, and the geek in me wanted to record just *how* noisy.
See you at Hack Day!
June 11th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
Yes, I think the decibel meter (or is it decibelometer?) will be cool. It’ll definitely encourage audience participation.
If the mail hack day we did the other week is any indication, the mail team may start giving search a run for their money with quality hacks.