Innovating with hackdays. Christian HeilmannITV Innovation Luncheon

What makes you happy?

What makes you happy?

• Delivering something

• Getting recognition for your work

• Solving problems

• Learning something new

• Finding ways to improve things

This is hard in our day-to-day job!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/goosmurf/3393799355/

This is hard in our day-to-day job!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/twicepix/518133135/

Leaving our comfort zone.

Hackdays work!

• Take 24 hours to build something new

• Disregard all the protocols you have in delivery

• Collaborate with people you haven’t worked with

• Deliver a working prototype and explain what you want to achieve with it

• Prepare a damn good 60 second pitch

Why take part?

Hackdays are for you!

• Show off what you are interested in - no matter how geeky

• Learn something new - is there a technology you always wanted to play with?

• Get out of your shell - partner with people with complimentary skills and give a great pitch.

• Release something on your terms and without waiting!

• Show that if your manager is not breathing down your neck you can release awesome in no time

Scratch your own itch!

Hackday awesome can leak...

• Write a tool to make a day-to-day process more efficient

• Show that by using a certain tool or technology you can deliver something very quickly

• Make the first step to learn that skill you always wanted to have but always pushed further out

• Show that your department can innovate and deliver

• Join a community outside the company

Hackdays are about delivery...

• Don’t bother building the best thing ever

• Concentrate on one thing and deliver a working prototype

• Steal, borrow, cheat... whatever it takes, get the message across

• Start something - make the code available

• If the hack works only on your machine, also create a screencast (http://screenr.com rocks for that!)

Use whatever tool you need!

Tools to use...

• Open technologies make it easy to build prototypes (HTML, CSS, JavaScript)

• Use libraries (jQuery, Google Visualisation libraries, d3.js, rafael.js...)

• Use APIs for data and conversion (programmableweb.com)

• Find APIs to do time consuming jobs for you (vid.ly for video conversion, YQL for data mashing)

Re-use and connect solutions

Prepare your delivery...

Pitching hard and fast...

• Show what your hack does

• Explain the effect this has - why is it a cool hack?

• Give ideas where this can go and how the company could benefit from it

After the hack day...

After the hack day...

• Have your hack as a package for people to show around the company (screencast, screenshots, working code, 3 sentence pitch)

• Keep hacking on it (freetime or ask your boss to get some extra time)

• Demand follow-up from your company!

My turn!

http://developer.mozilla.org

Interactive video effects?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/video-effects

Scene change detection

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/scene-change-detection-demo

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/add-track

Subtitling

Facial detection / analytics

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/facial-recognition-and-analytics-with-html5s-video

icanhaz.com/html5multimedia

icanhaz.com/johnhtml5

popcornjs.org

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/proto/hyperAudio/

popcornjs.org/butter

Universalsubtitles.org

icanhaz.com/audiosync

icanhaz.com/audioapi

mozillalabs.com/rainbow

/whois chris

Chris Heilmann

@codepo8http://wait-till-i.comhttp://developer.mozilla.org#html5 - freenode.net#mozilla - mozilla.org