Announcing LinkedIn's first Women's Hackday - DevelopHer
As a Hackday master at LinkedIn, I'm thrilled to announce that we'll be hosting our first ever DevelopHer Hackday on June 30 - July 1, 2012. It's 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), here's your chance to showcase your talents.
Request an invitation to DevelopHer Hackday now!
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 like the rush of cracking a difficult problem, but over time programming contests started feeling rigid and 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 were born as hacks. I love hackdays because what happens there is amazing. Strong personal bonds are created, you discover your physical and mental limits and experience absolute synergy with your team and others in the room.
How do you select a hackday project?
Everything starts with a seed of an idea, maybe something that fulfills a personal need or something huge that can shake up an entire industry. You do some quick research to make sure it hasn't been done already and put together a team, which means you have to go out and sell your idea to prospective teammates. We've setup a DevelopHer Hackday LinkedIn Group to help you discuss ideas and find teammates here. Once you have a team, the coding starts and continues all night until you have a solution to demo.
Request an invite Now!
On this special Women's Day, we want to share our love of hackdays with women in engineering and are very excited to announce LinkedIn's first Women's Hackday, DevelopHer. What will make this Women's Hackday extra special? Amazing judges, yoga and meditation sessions for those dancing neurons, delicious food, killer prizes and most importantly, sharing 24 hours with some of the smartest women in Silicon Valley.
So join me and other women engineers at LinkedIn for the Women's Hackday on June 30.