Hack Day - One day to build a product
By philhawksworth 07 Jul 2011.
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Today our development team are staying away from the office and instead heading to a local cafe where they have free wifi and plentiful bacon sandwiches. The aim is to spend some time working together in an attempt to build and launch a simple web product in a single day.
To some, this might seem like a self-indulgent bit of fun, and fun it is, but there is more to it than that.
Taking a little time to work like this every once in a while is great exercise for a development team. Especially a development team who work at an agency focussing mostly on client work rather than on their own products. It gives a chance to flex creative muscle, to learn some new techniques and technologies, to build one of the many things that we have captured over time on our wish list, and much more.
On this occasion, we have had an idea for a simple web application for some time. Simplicity is key when you are trying to build a product in a single day, but it is also important to us that we build something useful. Our idea was actually a request from Mike McIntyre, who lead our UX team. Mike asked for this application a long time ago, and although many similar applications exist in the marketplace already, there still isn't anything that quite met his needs.
I'll talk more (and I write this while my colleagues are feverishly writing code around me) about exactly what we are building in another post. It may evolve. That's the nature of such agile development with self-set requirements.
Critically though, days like this give us a chance to come together as a team and establish some valuable new ways of working and build some conventions that will be incredibly useful on future work. It also thrusts me, as the manager of the development team, into the middle of the development process in a way that I'm often a little removed from. Those managing development teams often miss out on the chance to get properly immersed in the act of writing code and I for one, enjoy the chance to dive back in and resharpen some of my skills.
Which reminds me. I'd better get back to it, or else I'll be slipping on my deliverables
Great educational fun. More to come!
