In his email instructions for Yahoo! Hack Day participants, Chad Dickerson writes:

"Hack Day is ultimately 'by hackers, for hackers' whether you're an engineer, a PM, designer, surfer, editor. . . whatever! The rules of Hack Day are simple: Build something that can be taken from idea to working prototype in one day; At the end of the day, we will celebrate what you've done on Hack Day with demos of your hacks (and beer, of course); Participants should be ready to present demos at the end of the day QUICKLY!"

Technologist and author Eric Raymond explores the playful and profound meaning of hack "as ‘an appropriate application of ingenuity’. Whether the result is a... patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it."

It's been more than a week since the second Yahoo! Hack Day. I'm hardly the first to blog about the ingenuity and cleverness, not to mention energy, courage, and friendly spirit that pervaded the event. Chad organized Hack Day, and he also blogged about it, as did Ed, Matt, Beach, and JR, to name a few. So, I've been thinking about what I could say that you may not have read elsewhere.

This is especially challenging because I can't tell you just yet about the hacks themselves -- which is where the real magic of innovation is explicit and incontestable. (But stay tuned.) I can say that prizes were awarded in the following categories: best overall, and runner-up overall (a category the judges added because it was so hard to pick just one winner), best use of APIs, best user experience, most unexpected, and people's choice. Notably, the people's choice award went to the "most unexpected" hack, and it was a second-time win. Same hacker won "most unexpected" at the first hack day back in December - now that's what I call "exceeding expectations."

The judges, seated in the front row, were senior executives and thought leaders from around Yahoo!. The room was packed with people, food, and drink. I saw old friends and colleagues I hadn't seen in months. Another executive stood on a windowsill to see better from the back of the room. I heard presentations from Bangalore, Burbank, London, as well as Santa Clara. In the voices up at the podium, I heard shyness, bravado, humor, pride, and accents from places all over the world. Sometimes the back of the room buzzed with mini-conversations and it was difficult to hear. But always, the applause was heartfelt and the mood of the audience was supportive, attentive. Each presenter had 90 seconds to show their hack, and we were rooting for every demo and every team.

Hours passed. Food disappeared. There was a downpour, a rainbow, and then it got dark. Kegs of beer were empty. Jumbo trays of nachos and enchiladas were decimated. There were towering stacks of empty pizza boxes under the tables. At the end of over 90 presentations, the awards were announced. The winners returned to the front of the room and accepted their trophies with the ad lib wit and grace of geeky Oscar recipients. We laughed, we applauded. The mood was jubilant. Then it was the weekend, and we all went home.

Hack Day is a showcase - recognition and celebration - of grassroots engineering ingenuity that is happening every day now. The coding and the conversations have a life of their own that continues in email, in impromptu meetings, in weekly hack lunches. And that's what's makes it such a powerful idea. Things change. Features are released. I find myself thinking of Iron Chefs: not every dish succeeds, not every savory morsel makes it onto future menus. But the energy of competition + collaboration enhances culinary experience in mysterious ways. Some recipes are inedible, some are half-baked. The tasty ones are refined, remembered, and served again. So it is with Hack Day.

After the first hack day at Yahoo!, the Autos team began to incorporate the Hack Day experience into the evolution of their product, alongside the rigorous product development cycle that drives all our products. They built a process to support ongoing evaluation and implementation of hacks. In fact, they've already got a couple new hacks live on the site, and a few more are queued up and ready to go into production. But that's a blog post for another day.

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo!