Announcing the first ever DevelopHer Hackday
March 8, 2012
As one of LinkedIn's 'Hackday Masters', I’m thrilled to announce that we’ll be hosting our first ever DevelopHer Hackday on June 30 - July 1, 2012 in Mountain View, CA. It will be a public competition for women engineers to get together, hack all night, meet amazing judges, eat food, do yoga, and compete with the best and brightest in Silicon Valley. If you’re a woman in engineering (student, intern, enthusiast, or professional), this is your chance to showcase your talents.
Request an invitation to DevelopHer Hackday now!
What's a hackday?
Since today is International Women’s Day, I’d like to share a little bit about my passion as a woman in engineering. Throughout my student life and career as an engineer, I’ve loved participating in programming contests: there’s nothing quite like the rush of cracking a difficult problem. However, over time, programming contests started feeling rigid. I realized I was more interested in producing creative solutions to meaningful problems and not just code.
This is when I discovered hackdays and fell head over heels for them. A 'hack' is a quick and dirty solution to a real world problem, usually built within 24 - 48 hours. It’s never perfect or complete, but it’s almost always clever and insightful.
At LinkedIn, we have hackdays once a month, where all employees are free to work on any idea they are passionate about. Everyone gets together to demo their hacks in front of the entire company and senior tech leaders vote on the ideas and pick winners. Some of the products you see on LinkedIn and LinkedIn Labs came out of hackday. A 'Hackday Master' is someone who has won at least 3 hackdays.
How do you find a hackday project?
Everything starts with an idea: perhaps it's something small that fulfills a personal need or maybe it's something huge that can shake up an entire industry. You do some quick research, make sure the idea is feasible and hasn’t been done already, and then try to put together a team by pitching your idea to your peers. For the DevelopHer Hackday, we've setup the DevelopHer Hackday LinkedIn Group to help you discuss ideas and find teammates. Once you have a team, the coding starts and continues all night until you have a solution to demo.
Amazing things happen at hackdays. Strong personal bonds are created, you discover your physical and mental limits, and you experience absolute synergy with your team and others in the room.
Request an invite now!
To celebrate Women’s Day, we want to share our love of hackdays with women all over the world. We are very excited to announce the first ever DevelopHer Hackday and hope you will join us.
What will make this Women’s Hackday extra special? Amazing judges, free schwag, yoga sessions for those dancing neurons, an endless supply of food and caffeien, killer prizes, and most importantly, sharing 24 hours with some of the smartest women in Silicon Valley.