What is a hackathon

[Mikel King]

On Jan 30, 2014, at 8:30 AM, Mark Saad <mark.saad at ymail.com> wrote:

> 
> 
>> On Jan 30, 2014, at 7:16 AM, Sujit K M <sjt.kar at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 9:50 AM, Mark Saad <mark.saad at ymail.com> wrote:
>>> All
>>> I know this may sound like a silly question but I wanted to get a broad opinion on this.
>>> My "friends" job announced they would be having a company hackathon, where groups would be
>> 
>> I find that suse as a company does do this in their calendar. These
>> are very intense sessions/hotly
>> debated and questioned by participants, i guess audience. This is
>> supposed to be done to increase
>> productivity of their staff.
>> 
>> -- 
>> -- Sujit K M
>> 
>> blog(http://kmsujit.blogspot.com/)
> 
> 
> I see. It like this , some of us haven't been working at hip enough companies to understand the new definition .  But then again why would a "new" company be against the traditional style of hackathon ? I say this as after this conversation started , off list, "[that] a traditional hackathon would be too boring for most new companies. You would have a hard time selling , let's have a hackathon to fix the spread sheets we use !"  But as far as I am concerned that's the sort of hackathon a new company , or in some cases any company, should have . 
> 
> ---
> Mark 


Or like all things the definition has evolved. 

I found the Etsy hack weeks to be great because you get to team up with resources form other parts of the company to build something new and usually incredibly useful. It's a fantastic way to build peer relationship across departmental lines.

Cheers,
m