This is the Yahoo! T-shirt I wore today: Hack Day Q4 2006. This was the first internal hack day I participated in and it was a lot of fun.

For the preceding 6 months, I was on a committee discussing various problems engineers have to deal with on a daily basis. One problem discussed at length was the ability to find answers for questions you have. There are a lot of places to find the answers, but they’re often still to hard to find. After a while the meetings were a little too much talk and too little action, so I volunteered my team to build a solution. We spent 24 hours creating an internal site that provided an amalgomation of Y! Answers, a wiki and email. It was really fun working with the team and seeing how much a dozen engineers could get done in 24 hours when they’re all working on the same problem.

Our project didn’t “win”, but it’s still being used, which I consider a big accomplishment. Interestingly, an idea I had 5 years ago and gave to another guy to implement DID win.

So I worked for 24 hours and all I got was a t-shirt. This “medium” shirt runs a bit small, but it’s not too bad. Can you find the printing error on it?

Acquired: 12/8/2006
Rating: 4/5