Chips and Dip and Dorks and Nerds
Like many small tech companies, our dreams are bigger than our staff: we’re always looking for those holes in the work week to try out new technologies, learn a new skill, or build a great prototype. But there’s always one more feature to write or bug to fix, and it’s hard to find the time.
Last week, we found the time. Jan 14-18 was our inaugural Hack Week, where our engineering, IT operations, data, and product design teams dropped their normal workload to build interesting things. Work began on Monday (or earlier), and we went pencils-down on Friday 2pm, for a series of 5-minute talks on each project, plus beer, carrots (not in the beer), and some weird chip-like things with a sour-cream-heavy dip.
We ended up with 30 projects, teams ranging from 1 to 7 in size, including
- Porting features of the Smalltalk debugger to Perl
- Using our geographic data to draw different kinds of maps - too bad the Zillow neighborhood data didn’t become available until midweek
- Testing managing our code base with Subversion, Fisheye, and Crucible (yes, we’re still a cvs shop…)
- Building bootable Windows CDs with core backup, recovery, and virus scanning tools for our install base (until we get everyone on MacBooks, anyway)
And a host of things we can’t talk about just yet. We have at least three projects which will make it out of Hack Week to the Interwebs - more to come on that later.
We had an esteemed judging panel which chose three winners - one from QA, one from Development, one from IT, so a nice mix - and each one received a chumby. I dropped one of the chumbys - seems like it should keep working, but we gave that one to the IT guy just in case.
The overall feedback was quite positive and we’ll be doing it regularly. One engineer did mention that it was “creativity with a gun to your head:” he’s planning his vacation for the same week. Can’t win ‘em all.
2 Comments
Interesting idea. What were the ground rules? Was there a requirement of business relevancy? Did the teams all ’self form’? Who were the judges?
Good questions (for some reason WordPress just emailed me this afternoon):
–No ground rules, besides the timeframes. We gave a bit of guidance around trying to do things where you could accomplish _something_ meaningful in a week - i.e. make sure you could succeed, even if it wasn’t finishing the project, in that amount of time. Almost everybody was able to do so.
–We didn’t make a specific requirement of business relevancy, but since every project was public and was to be presented, there was implicit pressure to do something that would matter to the audience. “Business relevancy” seemed too restrictive - the first example, porting features from the Smalltalk debugger, isn’t going to drive revenue in any immediate timeframe, but could improve developer efficiency, etc.: that level of indirection was ok.
–All teams self-formed. We did two things to try to help teams discover each other: open-house style meetings for people to talk through ideas (which didn’t really work), and a wiki for people to post their plans (which did, and which we would do again).
–The judges were our Product VP, Bizdev VP, and Marketing/SEO/SEM Lead. A good mix of folks with a bent towards customer experience: will mix them up next time for some variety. We also did a people’s choice award, which tracked very closely to the judge’s selections.
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