magnet December 31st, 2008
Hackfest @ Magnet
Venue - Kandivali
Week - Dec: 3rd week
Time - 12 pm - 1 pm
We received Hackfest event invitation on Monday 22nd Dec 08, the event was new to most Magneteers. Nirav & Kartik initiated all preparations. Nirav and Vishal gave the background and details about the event. It was going to be an interesting event as it was not just technical crowd puller but even non technical participants were involved.
Participants were given freedom of choice in terms of the task they would take up, The best part was task could be anything that would interest you, something that was on your wishlist or something that was not part of your daily task, they could also do it in pair or individually. Everyday one could take up new task or it could be a single task for 2-3 days together as well.
What we did different this time was that we interacted with all teams & took their feedback as to what would they like to do in the Hackfest. Based on that, we created tasks for different teams & in total, we had a pool of around 200 tasks, technical & non-technical both. That’s what was liked most by people. They simply picked up tasks & used to start working.
1hour everyday, fixed time for all, everyone consciously would work on their tasks or hobbies like painting, programming, hacking, research and development and many more.
One more interesting thing was there were awards for the best work.
Those 5 days was full of fun, learning, feeling of achievement. It was indeed a heartfelt “HackFEAST”.
At the end, the feedback was that people want this hackfest to continue. Some said they wouldn’t mind participating in a 2-day hackfest as well.
nirav May 20th, 2007
We had another Hackfest in Magnet this weekend. The last Hackfest was a roaring success. We had only five participants this time, but it was fun as well. For me, it was a “Samosa to Samosa” hack fest. We started at Saturday 7pm, and I really got on after 3 samosas in my tummy around 8.30! And after a Sunday morning dose of samosas, I started pacing down!
Collectively we did a number of things. Let me put some bullet points:
- Openfire integration with MSN, Yahoo!, Google and AOL messengers. So now we can easily talk to our clients using the same internal Jabber based messenger system.
- Streamlined user level backup system - spanning multiple servers and multiple configurations
- Lot of research on Microsoft Share Point Portal Server
- 3D UI with standard Flex components on Outsmart Labs. Amazing work! I wonder how they are doing it!
- We read a lot of blogs and learnt many new things!
- A lot of QuickSilver hacking
- Batch audio conversion using Switch as I wrote earlier
- Lot of research on mobile and mobile web - the trends, technologies etc
- SQL Injection and general hacking around
- SVN
- MySQL Clustering
- And we watched “Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro” - had a great time laughing! Spent more than an hour getting the VCD to show up on the projector though!
- The dinner and in-between discussions were insightful - we talked on topics ranging from security, grid computing, mobile as a computer, IPTV, Windows hacking, Benefits of eating healthy food, GTD philosophy, planning with a calendar, RSS subscriptions with Thunderbird and MP3 streaming
Good fun as usual! I am always looking forward to Hackfests in Magnet! Missed Kartik, Ameya and Naveen though!
nirav December 23rd, 2006
Kartik, Naveen and Ameya have organized Magnet’s first HackFest this weekend. Eight of us are here, ready to hack, and stuff our stomachs with pizzas and pesticides (err.. Coke). We already have some stuff going on. Participants so far are: Kartik, Naveen, Ameya, Vishal, Vinay, Mohan, Arun & Me.
Kartik kicked off the HackFest and told everyone about the schedule. We logged in at 5.15pm and will be logging out tomorrow 5.00pm. Till then, we are in the office, no one stepping out (except the organizers We brainstormed ideas of what we can hack on! Shortlisted a few, and after the pizza party, things will start rolling.
Till now, people have just got their feet wet. Researching a little bit here and there. Most of the research by the way, has gone in getting Quake working on all the machines here. Couldn’t join the arena from Linux / Mac yet. The Frag Match is over, and the winners are announced - Kartik and Vinay. I didn’t know Kartik was so good at Quake (or that the rest of us are so bad
I started on finding more about the popularity contest plugin to WordPress, to fix the spam comment problem I had - it was taking even the spam comment counts in calculating popularity. Surprisingly, it just worked today, without my changing anything. Not sure what changed. I reviewed the code, ran it, and it worked! Looks like my aura is really getting stronger!
Have made a list of things I want to work on. Let’s see where we reach!
I have put up some photos in the gallery under HackFest01, will be posting more as I process them! Will also post updates here.
