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« Full Schedule for Friday Speakers and Workshops | Main | HackDay06: The Flickr Stream »Hack Day tip: demoing your hack in 90 seconds or less
Running a Hack Day at Yahoo scale with hundreds of engineers participating introduces some unique logistics challenges, one of which is making sure that everyone who builds a hack has a fair chance to demo to their peers. Like our internal Hack Days, our open Hack Day will have only two basic rules:
- Take something from idea to prototype in 24 hours using at least one Yahoo! API, SDK, or other technology (plenty to choose from at http://developer.yahoo.com/.
- At the end of the hacking period, you demo your hack to everyone -- really fast, generally in 90 seconds or less
Having now run seven major internal Hack Days across three continents, we've exhaustively tested and settled the 90-second rule and it works really well. In practical terms, it means you can run through about 100 demos in 3 hours (which is why we've scheduled 3-6pm on Saturday 9/30 for the demos).
At our first Hack Day in December of last year, I'll admit that there was a fair bit of grumbling about the 90-second rule before the first demos started, but since then, Yahoos have become incredibly accomplished presenters. At the last two Hack Days, I'm guessing that a solid 85% of presenters (if not more) finished in under 90 seconds. In most cases, 90 seconds is just enough time to get your key points across.
Hack Day veteran Matt McAlister wrote a must-read post on this very topic: How to give a 90-second demo. If we've invited you to our Hack Day next weekend, be sure to read and learn before you hit the stage.
Incidentally, the photo in this post is of a fellow Yahoo presenting in front of the countdown clock we use. It's only down to 54 seconds -- he's relaxed and in good shape!
Chad Dickerson