Granted, it always happens that the most stuff i'd love to talk about happens on the day when i absolutely have no time to talk about it. Hopefully, i'll even have something to show for it.
Stay Tuned.
My division had "Hack Day" today. It was a chance for everyone to put aside the normal stuff, take the phone and pager off hook, and spend a day building the various programs that we all wished we could spend a day building. The idea was "Build something in a day, then stick around afterwards while everyone shows off what they did." They brought in snacks, sodas and beer, set up IRC channels and cleared calendars so folks could focus on doing cool stuff.
You have every right to be skeptical, since Lord Knows i was.
i fully expected a five or six people doing map based "mashups" where they showed where they liked to walk their dogs. In fact, for the hack i did, i purposefully avoided putting any results on a map.
Know what? i couldn't have been more wrong. At the wrap-up, i saw 60-some odd hacks that abused the API calls in amazing ways. Sadly, i can't show you any of them since we were told "Holy Crap! Most of these could become real products!"
Suffice to say, that in the next few months, you may see a lot of cool tools suddenly show up all over. Heck, maybe my hack might even make it out into the wild. (Although i was plagued by demo-deamons, i had a few folks ask me about it afterwards.)
i just wish that they hadn't brought in the idea of competing for prizes. We're engineers. We do this because it's fun. Passing out awards just seems like it's cheapening it.
Still, it was a helluva lot of fun, and i'm already plotting the my next one day hack.
