Are you ready for a Smackathon?
Just about once a quarter our engineering team will have a Hackathon. They stay up all night and code projects and ideas they haven’t had time to do or weren’t high priority.
Most of the product team (that I’m on) aren’t master coders like our engineers so… our Jedi master and VP of Product Joel Pulliam, not wanting the engineering team to have all the fun, decided to institute a Product-a-thon.
The Product-a-thon would be the same type of marathon session, where the product team would hunker down and work on documenting and spec’ing out all the projects that we hadn’t had time to write up and plan thus far.
Now let’s be honest… the name Product-a-thon isn’t as sexy a name as Hackathon. After probably drinking one too many Vitamin Waters (which he loves), Joel came up with the name Smackathon and it just stuck.
So at 12pm EST today, the Smackthon commenced. Because I think some of us enjoy sleep more than the engineers the official Smackathon hours are only from noon to midnight (while some will probably stay all night).
In between working on my project, I’ll be here to make sure any excitements are documented and reported back to you my loving community.
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:51 am
hey, guys, good luck with the smackathon. I find that most of my good product ideas die at, oh, ’bout 8pm unless I inhale chocolate and caffeine in toxic quantities, but perhaps you folks have enough on site.
Ghu help you if you don’t, though…!
-Anne
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:57 am
Anne, thanks so much for the comment. Yes, large quantities of chocolate and caffeine are crucial for any smackathon.
I think it’s been very successful. While it officially ended at midnight, there is still a small remnant of us continuing to move forward.
*raises my cup of espresso to you*