Hackathons at startups: Creative ‘fresh air’

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Every now and again, we hear about hackathons: Startup Weekend, Facebook’s famed all-nighters, Hack Week at Dropbox. However, in a startup, it’s so difficult to imagine how organizing a hackathon can be anything but harmful: “What do you mean, take a couple work days and drop what we’re doing? We’re in a race with competitors!… Read More…

Measuring interruptions: How to keep your team in the ‘zone’

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When you look at productive output from a software development team, there’s one factor that almost always predicts problems. You can have top talent; an outstanding idea; great agile process. And yet, if you don’t treat interruptions as a significant source of danger, the progress will be slow and painful. We all know and love… Read More…

Facebook: The personalization engine for all of the Web

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Facebook and its third-party applications today know a hell of a lot about each us: what content we read (Washington Post Social Reader); what music we listen to (Spotify); what movies we watch (Netflix). Facebook opened up a green field for the game creators, too: games with friends are just so much more engaging. However,… Read More…