{"id":768,"date":"2011-12-07T08:30:16","date_gmt":"2011-12-07T14:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=768"},"modified":"2011-12-06T09:19:14","modified_gmt":"2011-12-06T15:19:14","slug":"8z-real-estate-hackfest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/768","title":{"rendered":"8z Real Estate Hackfest"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently, at the company I work for, <a href=\"http:\/\/8z.com\/\">8z Real Estate<\/a>, we had a hackfest.\u00a0 A hackfest, for those not in the know, is a chance for employees to spend time working on whatever they want to do but don&#8217;t have time to do during the normal business day.\u00a0 It&#8217;s also known as &#8216;FedEx day&#8217; because you build something to ship in one day.<\/p>\n<p>The idea is to give everyone a chance to do something work related that they want to do, or try, or explore, but don&#8217;t have time to because of the hustle and bustle of work life.<\/p>\n<p>From <a href=\"http:\/\/rebelutionary.blogs.atlassian.com\/2005\/04\/the_inaugural_f.html\">the post at Atlassian<\/a> (as far as I know, the originators of FedEx day).<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[The] task must be something &#8220;out of the ordinary&#8221;. This is hard to define &#8211; but basically the spirit is that you can&#8217;t do something you would normally do. It&#8217;s a chance to attack all those &#8220;I wonder if XYZ would work&#8230; &#8220;, &#8220;It would be nice if we could&#8230; &#8221; small &#8230; tasks that always get pushed off in the heat of battle.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>We had about 11 employees and contractors gather at the office.\u00a0 Our schedule:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>8:00 Employees arrives, normal work begins<\/li>\n<li>10:00 Employees cease normal work<\/li>\n<li>10:00 &#8211; 10:30 brainstorm session<\/li>\n<li>10:30 &#8211; 10:45 pick projects<\/li>\n<li>12:00-1:00 eat lunch (<a href=\"http:\/\/eatsnarfs.com\/\">Snarfs<\/a>!)<\/li>\n<li>10:45-4:15 continue work on project<\/li>\n<li>4:30-5:30 present projects (8 min presentation) and drink a beer<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We had an 2 hour block of work at the beginning of the day because we needed to, but after that, almost no one did everyday work.\u00a0 Phones were off, email was closed.<\/p>\n<p>The type of projects selected varied.\u00a0 Most folks weren&#8217;t developers, so we didn&#8217;t have a ton of shipped software.\u00a0 But we had some really interesting ideas, ranging from investigation of interesting technologies (what&#8217;s coming down the pike with our e-newsletter sender, infographics) to outlines of business ideas, to refactoring of business processes.<\/p>\n<p>The excitement of all working together, in one room, on different projects, for a fixed amount of time, with no interruptions was one highlight.\u00a0 I also really enjoyed people&#8217;s varied takes on aspects of the business.\u00a0 It was also impressive to see the skills that I didn&#8217;t know some people had (powerpoint, for one).\u00a0 It was awesome how many good ideas we had, even though some of them would have taken a hackfest week to implement.<\/p>\n<p>All in all, it was a worthy experiment and something every business should consider doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently, at the company I work for, 8z Real Estate, we had a hackfest.\u00a0 A hackfest, for those not in the know, is a chance for employees to spend time [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-8z","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=768"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":779,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768\/revisions\/779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}