3. What makes you happy?
• Delivering something
• Getting recognition for your work
• Solving problems
• Learning something new
• Finding ways to improve things
4. This is hard in our day-to-day job!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/goosmurf/3393799355/
5. This is hard in our day-to-day job!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/twicepix/518133135/
7. Hackdays work!
• Take 24 hours to build something new
• Disregard all the protocols you have in delivery
• Collaborate with people you haven’t worked with
• Deliver a working prototype and explain what you want to
achieve with it
• Prepare a damn good 60 second pitch
9. Hackdays are for you!
• Show off what you are interested in - no matter how geeky
• Learn something new - is there a technology you always
wanted to play with?
• Get out of your shell - partner with people with
complimentary skills and give a great pitch.
• Release something on your terms and without waiting!
• Show that if your manager is not breathing down your neck
you can release awesome in no time
11. Hackday awesome can leak...
• Write a tool to make a day-to-day process more efficient
• Show that by using a certain tool or technology you can
deliver something very quickly
• Make the first step to learn that skill you always wanted to
have but always pushed further out
• Show that your department can innovate and deliver
• Join a community outside the company
12. Hackdays are about delivery...
• Don’t bother building the best thing ever
• Concentrate on one thing and deliver a working prototype
• Steal, borrow, cheat... whatever it takes, get the message
across
• Start something - make the code available
• If the hack works only on your machine, also create a
screencast (http://screenr.com rocks for that!)
14. Tools to use...
• Open technologies make it easy to build prototypes (HTML,
CSS, JavaScript)
• Use libraries (jQuery, Google Visualisation libraries, d3.js,
rafael.js...)
• Use APIs for data and conversion (programmableweb.com)
• Find APIs to do time consuming jobs for you (vid.ly for video
conversion, YQL for data mashing)
17. Pitching hard and fast...
• Show what your hack does
• Explain the effect this has - why is it a cool hack?
• Give ideas where this can go and how the company could
benefit from it
19. After the hack day...
• Have your hack as a package for people to show around the
company (screencast, screenshots, working code, 3 sentence
pitch)
• Keep hacking on it (freetime or ask your boss to get some
extra time)
• Demand follow-up from your company!