Sunday, July 15, 2007

Hack Week Recap

Hack Week ended two weeks ago, but I didn't find the time to write down some finalizing thoughts up to now. But here we go now:

Hack Week was an tremendously great experience. It was amazing how much creativity was set free. A smart move was the free breakfast for all which lead to people coming early to the offices, having a healthy meal and start hacking. It was in general a very positive atmosphere. I guess everybody enjoyed it. One frequent meme was "Do it again". Let's hope this will work out.

Two other statements I heard quite frequently were "My project turned out to be more difficult than I thought." and "I found a project which already does what I wanted to do." Both is good, because it shows that people were ambitious and the free software cosm provides a lot of solutions even to ambitious projects. Of course many developers found challenges which weren't solved before and did great work on them.

My own project was not as successfull as I would have liked. I discusses a lot of ideas and wrote some decent code, but I didn't get it to a really useful state. Garrett did some more work on the user interface which already looks quite nice and collects some useful data. We need to connect our two parts together, though, to achieve a richer experience for the user. I realized that this project has a lot of potential during the Hack Week. There are so many interesting things you can do with it (provided it works at some time) and when talking to others about the project, many exciting ideas came up. So I'm looking forward to spend some more time on this project.

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