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Yahoo’s Hack Day

Originally published by "dbarker" on 2005-12-10 17:15:00Z

Yahoo’s First Hack Day: What a Blast!: This is a nice concept, but I hear the guy’s over at Google get to do this one day a week, all the time.

Organized by Chad and supported by the rest of us on the Technology Development team, the plan was simple: give people a whole day to hack on prototypes, pet projects, ideas, learning a new tool, etc.

Make sure there’s ample food and drink available: coffee and snacks in the morning. Pizza, beer, and caffeinated drinks for lunch. Then more beer, snacks, and finger foods for dinner. At 5pm we’d gather in a conference room to let anyone demo what they’d done with their day.

Pretty everyday is a hack day for me, right Joe? There just needs to be more food…

Comment by "Joe" on 2005-12-10 09:10:00Z
If there were more food, there wouldn't be a hack day. Actually, it takes a fair bit of effort to make something like this work. We've tried on a couple of occasions to make every Friday or Friday afternoon 'hack day', but the ordinary workload always manages to creep back in.
Comment by "Josh" on 2006-10-01 15:37:00Z
Hey guys - Unfortunately my company definitely doesn't have a "hack day" all the time so this was a great occasion to go to to get together with ~400 fellow hackers and see what we could all come up with. The site my group did is on my link. It really was awesome to have a bunch of people who don't know each other team up to make cool things. As much as I'd like to, I often don't play around with public APIs in my free time, so this was an opportunity to find out just how easy some of them are to use in addition to getting to meet with the folks behind the APIs. Cool to see one of my favorite blogs covering the event ;)