We used to run internal hackdays at Pachube and found them extremely productive. Come to work on Friday, use the Pachube API, make something cool and show it at the end of the day. They were always immensely useful for finding bugs and gaps in our API. In fact a single hackday was often better than weeks of R&D, when it came to improving the core product. For some reason they fizzled out over time but we have brought them back in 2012.

As we are rolling out oAuth soon, I thought having an oAuth themed hackday to kick off the year seemed logical. Others started getting excited about the prospect of the return of hackdays and extended the invitation out to interesting techies passing through London that day.

Suddenly something changed, as we had inadvertently imposed rules and a certain formality to proceedings. Even though we still managed to debug several issues within our oAuth workflow, the usual level of creativity and fun somewhat died.

I’ve had brilliant ideas brewing for weeks but they don’t fit the theme!

oAuth sucks!

Who is going to entertain the guests?

Must we form groups to include them?

After thinking about better ways of running them and agreeing with much of this post on stackexchange, I believe our next internal hackday should follow a few basic guidelines:

• Keep it within the team
• Start with everyone in one space at a certain time
• Require no participation or collaboration
• Provide lunch

Levent Ali · 8 January 2012 · hackday oauth pachube