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The satisfaction one gets from Hacking

Ben mentions on his blog and the Six Apart website about the joy of hacking and some of the things they've achieved for a release of Typepad by just holding a hackathon.

Joe Kraus, FeedBurner, and others have done a good job of demonstrating the effectiveness of periodic hackathons on inspiring creativity. As a fast-growing company with multiple products and international offices, though, one of the biggest barriers we've faced has not been lack of creativity in and of itself--what we've been missing, in part, is channeling that creativity into features that get released in our products.

Over on Six Apart News I posted about the Scratchathon that we held, which work formed the basis for our most recent TypePad release.

This is an amazing release, because it combines work from all of the engineers working on TypePad, and includes features that we & our customers have wanted for a long time. In fact, Mena writes about her favorite new feature on Mena's Corner:

Believe me, not having the ability to choose specific photo albums has bugged me since day one of TypePad.

We'll continue to post more information about the new features over the next couple of days, including the feature I worked on during the Scratchathon.

Taking time out from one's normal schedule to fix small annoyances can be useful, as you get to scratch at code you normally are not prodding as part of your day to day coding activities as well as making adding new features to your codebase.

Allowing employees to take ownership for a project of their own choosing for a product is a great way of getting employees to think differently about the product and be creative and think outside of the box.

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