I have to admit — since HackU ended, I have been struggling with how to contextualize it. It’s hard to put a nice neat wrapper around something that was so profound for me. For the people who were there (and you can read for yourself), it felt like a defining moment. The best way for now is to point out some of the people who made it happen and tell some of the inside story. In some later posts, I’ll probably go through some of the principles that guided us in planning Hack Day (e.g. who we invited and why, approaches to making such an event work), but for now, I just want to provide some backstory and point out some of the people who helped make this happen. There are literally hundreds of people in the mix, so I apologize in advance for those who I have missed. This will be my first attempt “official recounting” . Like all good stories, some things will be left between the lines, of course.
Before I get into the narrative, if anyone out there is wondering how we pulled this off, I offer one clue: total pros rolling up their sleeves to do whatever needed to be done. I’ve always been surprised at how intelligent people ascribe self-limiting qualities to organizations that they don’t really have to accept. Large companies are “slow.” Small companies are “agile.” “They” would never let us do this. What happens when you work in a large company and you are able to leverage the size of the organization to form a lean-and-mean ad hoc team with broad expertise (technical, management, legal, security, networking, etc.) on a moment’s notice? Something pretty powerful — you turn the cynical “they” who won’t let you do anything into the unstoppable “we” that won’t take no for an answer. I learned that inspiration might be the world’s only renewable energy source and it scales like a bank's interest rates!!.
Now, getting into the world of "thank yous" and the world otherwise. I feel that it’s an almost impossible task to get this right, but there are some specific people I wanted to thank. First, there's my team mates Madhan, Smitha and Spoorthy. It was such a great team to work with that, when we moved over to begin , we started talking about our goals almost immediately and the ideas started crystalizing no sooner than late. I honestly don't remember exactly how the "crazy" Mail Template+GreaseMonkey idea crystalized, but when it did, it was Madhan who gave us that patented Brad Pitt look that said, “dude, this is TOTALLY POSSIBLE!” and quietly lit the fire under us and himself(!) to make it happen. I’m hoping that everyone out there has a boss like this one day. Then Smitha well she's a full-swinger!. She has the most versatile brain, she used to flip her thoughts to sync the ideas that popped and parally thump in her understandability of the APIs and how they could help us move ahead(Infact, her duties also involved handling of the entire event as a volunteer too!- Man, that was real tough one!).Finally, Spoorthy- err!, this lady was the one behind the ideas, she'd generate the ideas faster that you can sync them in!!. Some of our fondest ideas of this whole process were her brain-child(ren);
Then once we got the verbal commitment done on our events, the lads and lasses were gracious enough to pick up that ball and run with it, dealing with the production issues, the code, the debugging, the betas, the alphas and anything else related to the hack, smack and crack of the code!. It was a gargantuan task that had never been done before. One of my favorite moments happened about half an hour before the show actually ended when I bumped into Arun Raghavendar and Tom Praison for a last miniute buckle-up tricks on the final hack that involved combining the hover-effect of the YUI into an Y-BOSS image search. And there it was- "Phew!" Tom and Arun got the lids shined and placed a crystal on it!. Imagine, they just ran through a 400 liner in about 5 mins and got their acts together and cracked the bug in just about 20 mins! (Where as I took a whopping 12 hours to get the code done! :P).
And last but not the least can we forget Paul Tarjan(Head Technical Monkey :P),Mr. Nagarajan, Rajesh(He's my super senior at UVCE too!),Jayasurian and the entire bunch of the Yahoo R&D team put the whole excellent Saturday agenda together along with other classmates of mine at IIITB. In one of the key roll-up-your-sleeves moments in my and perhaps our lives!.
To the extended HackU organizing team,well, you guys totally rocked — all several tens of you . And a gigantic thanks to all of you who cam over and made this developmental spree a great fun to cherish for several years to come , if not life time.
As a chorus, i would love to thank my team,yeah the team that I am so freaking proud of you. Its was a real fun time with you people out there!.
Before I get into the narrative, if anyone out there is wondering how we pulled this off, I offer one clue: total pros rolling up their sleeves to do whatever needed to be done. I’ve always been surprised at how intelligent people ascribe self-limiting qualities to organizations that they don’t really have to accept. Large companies are “slow.” Small companies are “agile.” “They” would never let us do this. What happens when you work in a large company and you are able to leverage the size of the organization to form a lean-and-mean ad hoc team with broad expertise (technical, management, legal, security, networking, etc.) on a moment’s notice? Something pretty powerful — you turn the cynical “they” who won’t let you do anything into the unstoppable “we” that won’t take no for an answer. I learned that inspiration might be the world’s only renewable energy source and it scales like a bank's interest rates!!.
Now, getting into the world of "thank yous" and the world otherwise. I feel that it’s an almost impossible task to get this right, but there are some specific people I wanted to thank. First, there's my team mates Madhan, Smitha and Spoorthy. It was such a great team to work with that, when we moved over to begin , we started talking about our goals almost immediately and the ideas started crystalizing no sooner than late. I honestly don't remember exactly how the "crazy" Mail Template+GreaseMonkey idea crystalized, but when it did, it was Madhan who gave us that patented Brad Pitt look that said, “dude, this is TOTALLY POSSIBLE!” and quietly lit the fire under us and himself(!) to make it happen. I’m hoping that everyone out there has a boss like this one day. Then Smitha well she's a full-swinger!. She has the most versatile brain, she used to flip her thoughts to sync the ideas that popped and parally thump in her understandability of the APIs and how they could help us move ahead(Infact, her duties also involved handling of the entire event as a volunteer too!- Man, that was real tough one!).Finally, Spoorthy- err!, this lady was the one behind the ideas, she'd generate the ideas faster that you can sync them in!!. Some of our fondest ideas of this whole process were her brain-child(ren);
Then once we got the verbal commitment done on our events, the lads and lasses were gracious enough to pick up that ball and run with it, dealing with the production issues, the code, the debugging, the betas, the alphas and anything else related to the hack, smack and crack of the code!. It was a gargantuan task that had never been done before. One of my favorite moments happened about half an hour before the show actually ended when I bumped into Arun Raghavendar and Tom Praison for a last miniute buckle-up tricks on the final hack that involved combining the hover-effect of the YUI into an Y-BOSS image search. And there it was- "Phew!" Tom and Arun got the lids shined and placed a crystal on it!. Imagine, they just ran through a 400 liner in about 5 mins and got their acts together and cracked the bug in just about 20 mins! (Where as I took a whopping 12 hours to get the code done! :P).
And last but not the least can we forget Paul Tarjan(Head Technical Monkey :P),Mr. Nagarajan, Rajesh(He's my super senior at UVCE too!),Jayasurian and the entire bunch of the Yahoo R&D team put the whole excellent Saturday agenda together along with other classmates of mine at IIITB. In one of the key roll-up-your-sleeves moments in my and perhaps our lives!.
To the extended HackU organizing team,well, you guys totally rocked — all several tens of you . And a gigantic thanks to all of you who cam over and made this developmental spree a great fun to cherish for several years to come , if not life time.
As a chorus, i would love to thank my team,yeah the team that I am so freaking proud of you. Its was a real fun time with you people out there!.
