#hacksgiving

Last year, we turned the days before Thanksgiving into Hacksgiving – a time to put aside our normal work responsibilities and try something different. Harvesters used that time to play with new technologies, build out experimental features, improve our internal tools, and to have a little fun. It was such a hit that we decided to do it again this year.

Today, we wrapped up Hacksgiving 2 with a company-wide video call. Once again our team delivered an incredible variety of work for 2 1/2 day so hacking. Just take a look:

For our customers

Better Contact Form: improvements to our support contact form

Forecast Two Factor Authentication: makes your Forecast account extra secure

Harvest API Browser: a tool for building and evaluating API requests

IFTTT Integration: a set of recipes for use with IFTTT

Shunter: a tool for deploying new and experimental features in Forecast

SHA-2 Test: a method for testing and reporting whether or not a browser can support modern SSL certificates

Internal Tooling

Admin to Bootstrap: moving our admin tooling to the Bootstrap CSS framework

Cooking with ChemKit: better automated QA testing

Docker Dev Environments: a way to ease the set-up time for our developers

Harvest Feature Request: a new way of keeping track of feature requests from our customers

Mission Control 2.0: improvements to an internal tool born during last year’s Hacksgiving

Paperboy Updates: improvements to our internal discussion tool

Party!: a Mac app for using Co-op

Prism: a Chrome Extension that brings images to Trello

Orb: a tool for evaluating the our build times

Zendesk Product Flagger: makes it crystal clear which product (Harvest or Forecast) our customers are writing in about

Zendesk Support Assistant: adds important information to our customer support tickets

Experimental Projects

Android Geofenced Timers: timers that start or stop based on your location

Apple Watch UI: some examples of how Harvest might look on the Apple Watch

Harvest for Mac Nueue: a new version of our Mac App written in Swift

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

Having missed out on the first edition of Hack n Jill, I made sure I attend the Hacksgiving edition earlier this month. Boy, was it an amazing event!

Hosted at Etsy Labs in Dumbo, the first ever 1:1 gender ratio hackathon was an absolute blast - from fun loving crew to delicious Ice creams to jokes a plenty to oh, some incredible hacks built inside 24 hours, Hacksgiving was everything a fun developer weekend should be.

What is Hack n Jill

Hack'n Jill brings equal numbers of men and women together for a day of hacking.

For their second hackathon, Hack'n Jill brought together developers and designers to build apps for greater good, for helping and giving back to the community.

The Hacks

Over 20 hacks were built inside 24 hours. Here's a complete list of hacks built at Hacksgiving.

Best Mashery Hack

In the spirit of the holidays and the theme of "giving", the award for "Best app built using Mashery API Network" was won by Room Match - a wonderful app that uses Expedia's API to let you donate hotel rooms to people in times of disaster. Very nicely done indeed.

Another app worthy of mention here is Woof that used Patch API to pull disaster related info around your neighborhood and allows you to contact your friends quickly.

Thanks for Hacks-giving!