A few hours ago I came to the end of a 2-day team “hackathon” at work. Twas to mean mere regular office hours officially, but unofficially, as long as you want. My recollection of the experience itself, on let’s say, an hour by hour basis, was one of interminable low-levels of despair and mild horror. As soon as time was called on the coding part and the results and ideas were presented to a panel of colleagues that irrational sense of doom was replaced with irrational elation. It’s this elation that I now feel will be the predominant memory of those distinctly unpleasant optional extra hours. Even within that relatively small timeframe of burning the candle from every end that could be found, I could feel myself becoming stupiderer.