AGI Hack Day: Mission Accomplished!
Once upon a time, some Python developers here at AG Interactive said, “Gosh, we should totally do one of those fancy Hack Day things.” And they went unto their manager, who said, “What excellent timing, I think we should totally do one of those fancy Hack Day things too. Let’s make it happen.” And so they did. And it was good.
I’m very, very pleased to report that our first-ever AGI Hack Day was a smashing success. Roughly fifty people, divided into fourteen self-organized teams, spent 24 hours putting together prototypes of whatever great ideas came to mind, covering ground from new product ideas to deeply geeky internal architecture improvements, and then presented their work in three-minute demos similar to the PyCon lightning talks. Prizes were awarded today in the “fun” categories (“Funniest Hack,” “Hacker’s Choice,” etc.); a forthcoming second round of demos for our senior team will yield the big winners.
Hack Day has definitely been a big score for our culture. The atmosphere has been so alive and vibrant, with a hum of excitement and activity, a certain je na sais quois of Cool Stuff In Progress. It’s been fun just to be around it. One very good choice that we made was to open up the event to non-developers, so that our talented system admins, UI gurus, product managers, and even QA folks were able to jump in and come up with great ideas. A few adventurous souls liveblogged their experiences, and photos have been appearing on Flickr (including some excellent late-night Guitar Hero shred-nanagins).
The response from the company has been very positive, so I think we can look forward to many more excellent AGI Hack Day events in the future.
- Mood:hacktacular
- Music:Laibach – “2525″