Adam Jordens@littlesquare:~/

A couple weeks ago I organized our first hack day which proved to be extremely well received by everyone involved.

The event was loosely based on what Yahoo! has been doing for awhile now but our developers didn’t really start until 8 or 9 in the morning and we cut coding off at 4 in the afternoon. We’re a smallish team (14-odd developers) but had been wanting to run a hack day for many months now. Despite only 7 or 8 hours of development, the creativity was unbelievable which in turn proved to be quite the shocker for some in the organization. Although not a goal by any means (and almost something that was discouraged) it also didn’t hurt that much of what was created could be worked back into either the product or the development process.

We had everything ranging from a java applet backed by a python web application to the addition of a perl interpreter in the popular eggdrop irc bot to a RoR mash-up of JIRA, del.icio.us, FishEye, Confluence and Salesforce and everything in between.

Looking into the future the company is planning on running events like these every quarter. It’s a good breakup to the regular product development cycle and gives everyone an opportunity to step outside the regular development mold and open a few eyes at the same time.

At this time, I’d like to say a special thanks to JetBrains for their donation of a personal IntelliJ IDEA license. The lucky winner sure was pleased!