Hack Day #2 – GenoLogics

13 Mar 2007

This coming Friday GenoLogics will be hosting its first Hack Day of 2007 (and second overall).  As with the previous event, it’s internally focused with me serving as the organizer aka. the person who ends up doing the prize shopping. 

Our company has been fairly receptive and has even committed to 4 hack days a year (roughly scheduled by quarters).  There were some initial concerns over how these days would impact our 3 week development iterations but sanity eventually won out.  If our schedule was so tight that we couldn’t spare a day, we’d be in pretty bad shape.  It’d be nice to think that we’re not doing too badly. 

The company hasn’t grown significantly over the past year (~50 people in total) so I would expect about ~20 people to participate.

Our last hack day occurred in November and was somewhat limited to developer (and the odd Product Manager) participation.  This time around there’s been enough interest from other departments that the CEO has asked that everyone be included (not that anyone was being excluded previously, it was just marketed more towards coders).

The schedule is looking as follows:

8:00 – 8:30 : Start

12:00 – 1:00 : Lunch Break (pizza provided)

3:45 – 4:00 : Finish

4:00 – 5:00 : Demonstrations

You can’t help but notice there’s not a lot of time actually set aside for coding.  If you’re intense enough you could always take the pizza back to your desk.  The last hour has been set aside for walking demonstrations (where everyone gathers around each desk and the coder spends a few minutes explaining their hack).  We didn’t even attempt to vote on hacks last time and likely won’t this time either.  Everybody does an excellent job and should have an equal opportunity to take a prize home. 

That’s about it.  I’ll post some pictures and perhaps a movie next week.