Hacksgiving 2013
Just before the Thanksgiving holidays last week, we put a pause on work as usual to devote 2 days to something we call Hacksgiving[1]. During this time, the team was invited to work on anything of their choosing. The only parameter was that the projects should be “Harvest related” in some way; anything that our customers or teammates will find helpful or useful would be fitting. To get things rolling, people simply posted ideas and rallied others to collaborate with them. No projects needed approval and the event was hardly limited to just developers. Our designers, support team and marketing team all jumped in.
The result? An impressive set of 18 projects was presented at our special Show & Tell. Projects ranged from the very technical (Harvest is now IPv6 compliant!), to the beautiful (our marketing site is looking just a bit more polished). Developer tests got better and faster, and various improvements to our beloved Co-op were made. And amongst many other things, a special set of GIFs (ThanksGIFing[2], of course) were created and to be shared a few lucky customers.
At the end of all the presentations, we threw in a twist. We wanted to recognize the standout projects, and especially those which reflected our Harvest Eight values (these are our core values which we’ll write more about another time). Using the fantastic Poll Everywhere, everyone live-voted their favorites to close out the presentation. It proved to be really fun way for the team to provide recognition. Hats off to everyone involved, it was incredible to see what got done in just a couple days. More importantly, it was great to see everyone have fun along the way. -DW
[1] Hacksgiving – coined by our organizer, Patrick Filler.
[2] ThanksGIFing – named by the always clever Warwick Poole.