Why your company should do an internal hackathon
blog.mumm.me
Why your company should do an internal hackathon
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: Why your company should do an internal hackathon
#2I think it would be better to try taking google's 20% philosophy and making it a "Hey, do you have an idea? No? Well, join this team for the hackathon!" Run it on four days a month in a row but during normal hours. This allows people to talk about it and not burn out.
I'm assuming that most teams do not program in their spare time for fun.
/IANAM
Re: Why your company should do an internal hackathon
#3My company should hire a few more good folks so we can get our jobs done without burning out. :(
Most of my "hacks" are tools that make our processes more effective. I have to "steal" chunks of time to create them but they pay off in time saved.
Re: Why your company should do an internal hackathon
#4My company has a week long hackathon every 8 weeks. I'm new to the company and so have not participate in one yet. But in asking about them they are seen as very positive. Many hackathon ideas make it into the product (some have been absolute game changers) or improve company processes/tools, they make the developers happy, and give an outlet for where more interesting and/or controversial ideas can get a chance to air.
Re: Why your company should do an internal hackathon
#5Not quite a hackathon, but the company I work at started a regular coding Dojo in Zürich.
Re: Why your company should do an internal hackathon
#6At Twilio we've held internal hackathons with great results. We usually do them when we have a new product that we want to test internally before releasing to a slightly wider audience. This has helped the whole company get familiar with new products which leads to good feedback and better support once the product is live.
Re: Why your company should do an internal hackathon
#7At Q42, the company I work for, we have a yearly hackathon. We start Friday morning and then depending on individual circumstances work until anywhere from Friday night to Sunday night.
We've covered last November's hackathon on tumblr: http://w00tcamp.tumblr.com/
One of the resulting projects is http://www.soundmatch.me/ -- enter your Last.fm username and it will generate a Spotify playlist based on your music recommendations.
Re: Why your company should do an internal hackathon
#8We at Skyscanner did a 24 hour hackathon a few months ago for our FlyScan product. It was quite hectic but did a great job highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of our release process from conception to release to marketing. It's definitely an enlightening experience.
Re: Why your company should do an internal hackathon
#9A common outcome of a hackathon is a demonstration to the engineers how much faster they can work when the don't have to deal with: other engineers, product managers, mandated company tools and company release processes. Not sure that is something most companies want to teach.
Re: Why your company should do an internal hackathon
#10I've experienced both short code sprints and hackathons, and I can recommend both.
At Yola we had a series of short code sprints to focus as much attention as possible on a particular project - no interruptions, specific outcomes, everyone fully present. Authoritative decisions came faster due to high-bandwidth communication between everyone with a stake (and that spilled over a bit after the sprints).
Meanwhile, hackathons at Facebook seem to continue the aims of bootcamp - promoting discovering more about people, code, and technologies that you won't usually interact with on your usual team/job. After the day (or two) recovering from hacking all night, everyone seems a little more energised.