A quick introduction to using hack days as a means of innovating in a company and why it makes sense to take part as a developer.

1. Innovating with
hackdays.
Christian Heilmann
ITV Innovation Luncheon

2. What makes you happy?

3. What makes you happy?
• Delivering something
• Getting recognition for your work
• Solving problems
• Learning something new
• Finding ways to improve things

4. This is hard in our day-to-day job!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/goosmurf/3393799355/

5. This is hard in our day-to-day job!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/twicepix/518133135/

6. Leaving our comfort zone.

7. Hackdays work!
• Take 24 hours to build something new
• Disregard all the protocols you have in delivery
• Collaborate with people you haven’t worked with
• Deliver a working prototype and explain what you want to
achieve with it
• Prepare a damn good 60 second pitch

8. Why take part?

9. Hackdays are for you!
• Show off what you are interested in - no matter how geeky
• Learn something new - is there a technology you always
wanted to play with?
• Get out of your shell - partner with people with
complimentary skills and give a great pitch.
• Release something on your terms and without waiting!
• Show that if your manager is not breathing down your neck
you can release awesome in no time

10. Scratch your own itch!

11. Hackday awesome can leak...
• Write a tool to make a day-to-day process more efficient
• Show that by using a certain tool or technology you can
deliver something very quickly
• Make the first step to learn that skill you always wanted to
have but always pushed further out
• Show that your department can innovate and deliver
• Join a community outside the company

12. Hackdays are about delivery...
• Don’t bother building the best thing ever
• Concentrate on one thing and deliver a working prototype
• Steal, borrow, cheat... whatever it takes, get the message
across
• Start something - make the code available
• If the hack works only on your machine, also create a
screencast (http://screenr.com rocks for that!)

13. Use whatever tool you need!

14. Tools to use...
• Open technologies make it easy to build prototypes (HTML,
CSS, JavaScript)
• Use libraries (jQuery, Google Visualisation libraries, d3.js,
rafael.js...)
• Use APIs for data and conversion (programmableweb.com)
• Find APIs to do time consuming jobs for you (vid.ly for video
conversion, YQL for data mashing)

15. Re-use and connect solutions

16. Prepare your delivery...

17. Pitching hard and fast...
• Show what your hack does
• Explain the effect this has - why is it a cool hack?
• Give ideas where this can go and how the company could
benefit from it

18. After the hack day...

19. After the hack day...
• Have your hack as a package for people to show around the
company (screencast, screenshots, working code, 3 sentence
pitch)
• Keep hacking on it (freetime or ask your boss to get some
extra time)
• Demand follow-up from your company!

20. My turn!

21. http://developer.mozilla.org

22. Interactive video effects?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/video-effects

23. Scene change detection
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/scene-change-detection-demo

24. Subtitling
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/add-track

25. Facial detection / analytics
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/facial-recognition-and-analytics-with-html5s-video

26. icanhaz.com/html5multimedia

27. icanhaz.com/johnhtml5

28. popcornjs.org

29. http://minnesota.publicradio.org/proto/hyperAudio/

30. popcornjs.org/butter

31. Universalsubtitles.org

32. icanhaz.com/audiosync

33. icanhaz.com/audioapi

34. mozillalabs.com/rainbow

35. /whois chris
Chris Heilmann
@codepo8
http://wait-till-i.com
http://developer.mozilla.org
#html5 - freenode.net
#mozilla - mozilla.org