The Pros and Cons of Hackdays

There’s been a flurry of hackdays of late. The one with the most press as of late has been the White House one, though a colleague also pointed out a more targeted collaboration between medical academics and Facebook, Google, and AWS.

However, it’s also interesting to read about the opinion towards such events beginning to change. As I noted earlier, there’s a call for events to be more purposeful, while others have criticised the potential for them to become work-for-food events for companies.

Stef Lewandwoski has also been doing some research into hack days which is well worth a read (and he has probably folded into the startup he is involved in, Makeshift An aside: they’re hiring!)

And a pernickety aside, I have to admit that after 16 hours, looking at a pizza makes me want to gag. This and other things are discussed by ChinPen in his blog post on how hackdays are bad for you.