We recently had our second full-day hackathon at Plaxo, which we affectionately refer to as “Haxo”. [Our first Hackathon was last December, but somehow we never got around to blogging it (doh!).]
Some of our Haxo projects (see more)
Amazon wishlist in birthday reminder
Firefox toolbar
Analysis of website performance
PlaxoRank
For the uninitiated, a Hackathon is a designated day where you’re freed from all your normal daily obligations (meetings, bug fixes, upcoming releases) and you can work on whatever you want. We provided breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and everyone worked frenetically from the morning until late at night. The general rule is that projects have to be somewhat related to the company’s direction, but everyone is encouraged to work on something new and different, and in particular on something that wouldn’t otherwise make it to the top of the priority list. This includes cool new features that might apply to a niche of our user base, fixing some long-standing but low-grade annoyances or bugs, or research about some potential new market or technology. Everyone in the company is encouraged to participate—not just engineers. Some of the PMs and Biz team members rolled up their sleeves and started coding, while others made mock-ups or proposals.
It’s always amazing what a passionate and creative bunch of people can accomplish in a single day. It sometimes makes me wonder if everyday shouldn’t be a Haxo day! Here are some examples of the projects we built during Haxo II:
- Send an SMS to your friend’s phone using Click-to-Connect
- See your friend’s Amazon wish list inside a reminder of their birthday
- Firefox toolbar, with one-click auto-signin access to Plaxo Online
- Highlight any text in a web page and add it to your address book or calendar (using NLP to parse out the different fields of information)
- Send a Plaxo eCard using any photo found on the web
- Sync your bookmarks between Firefox and IE (and access them on Plaxo Online)
- Periodic backup wizard that runs automatically to create a snapshot of your data
- “PlaxoRank” comparison of how connected two contacts are (ala AimFight)
- One-box find-as-you-type search of all your contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes
- Shared group address book
- Tool to collect and report all the unique crashes (with stack traces) from our server farm
- Profiling our web site performance (found several easy ways to make it faster!)
- Internal dashboard of which Plaxo features are being used the most (from our data warehouse)
- Candid photos of everyone at Plaxo
We hope to release some of these new features in our production service soon. And we’re planning to make Haxo a monthly affair, given how successful it’s been so far. But while the things produced during Haxo are always impressive, the most valuable outcome is that everyone leaves so happy and energized. After all, we’re all builders and hackers at heart, and as anyone will tell you, entrepreneurship is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. So the real point of Haxo is to let everyone bask in that 10% a little longer, so we can all do what we really love most.
