A Day in the Life Of a Kudos Hack-Day
Every few months the Kudos Product and Engineering teams have a hack day away from the office.
The goal is to put aside what we’re currently working on (though we still keep an eye on alerts) and work on something experimental.
We try to come up with ideas beforehand, or areas to focus on, so we can start the day running. If an idea may have value to the Kudos website, great! If it doesn’t, it may still involve a technology we want to get familiar with.
But the key is to break free of our current way of thinking and try something new.
How do we start?
- Read over the ideas list
- Discuss the ones that pique our interest
- Choose which idea(s) to work on
- Split into teams if required
The important bit is reading and discussing the ideas list: it’s a great way to kick-start the creative process, and often results in more ideas being added!
So many ideas to choose from
Sometimes there’s one really interesting idea with many parts; other times two or three smaller ideas. Both are suitable for splitting up across everyone involved.
In the “Hack Day Ideas” spreadsheet (which we are always updating) we rank the ideas from low/medium/high in two specific categories:
1. “Chances of finishing in a day?”
We want to work on an idea that’s achievable in our hack day, to avoid the feeling that we’re leaving it behind when we go back to work. It’s a nice feeling to accomplish something in a day!
2. “Chances of making it into a sprint soon?”, similar to but not the same as “Can we ship it?”
The Kudos Product and Engineering team work in two-week sprints. The amount of work we assign to each sprint is determined by our agile task tool. We think it’s best if the hack-day project we work on is likely to be deployable sooner rather than later.
That said, there’s always room for all kinds of ideas.
Teams
There’s no hard-and-fast rule to teaming up: everyone is free to move around and pair with others. You can offer insight, do some code, or map out an idea.
It’s a relaxed day
We start getting down to coding when we want (or when we get excited about an idea and can’t wait to start it!) and we take it slow.
But if you want to zip through something to give it a go, you do you. Remember: it’s about breaking free of our current way of thinking and trying something new.
End of the day
Whatever it is that’s been done must be presented! It doesn’t have to be a full-blown slide-deck with transitions; it can be just some screenshots of what you’ve done with an explanation.
This is basically just an end-of-day discussion around what we’ve accomplished, and the fun we’ve had. It’s very relaxed, even if the rules don’t seem to be!
Previously…
We’ve looked into Google’s Natural Language API, procedural image generation, and image generation based on data to provide unique images that are also relevant.
We want to stay up to date with the latest technologies so our tech stack doesn’t lag behind. Hack-days are a perfect opportunity to try our new things and see if it’s worthwhile using them.
If all this sounds interesting to you, why not consider joining Kudos? We also have a primer on what you can expect your first day to be like.
