How hack days foster creativity and innovation in our tech team

What are hack days?

For anyone well-acquainted with the tech industry it’s obvious that creativity and innovation are just as important as having a clean and robust codebase (if not even more so!). After all, we don’t want to be writing code and building products that simply reinvent the wheel. Hack days are the perfect breeding ground for such creativity and innovation in the tech environment, something that was recognised early on at Bright Network.

Hack days are a designated period (in our case, usually two to three days every few months) that is set aside for engineers to deprioritise their daily sprint tickets in favour of dedicated time to ideate, design, learn, and build something novel. This gives engineers the chance to explore their creativity and produce something that might be great!

We often find ourselves consumed by roadmaps and timelines, but perhaps have ideas of our own that might improve our user experience or make our product more unique and competitive. Fixed timelines don’t always give the freedom to work on these new innovative ideas, or we might feel like we shouldn’t be using time on them. However, with hack days any project is fair game and there is no judgement at all from the rest of the team providing you had fun and learnt something whilst working on the project you did.

Hack days at Bright Network

Hack days occur roughly every three months in our tech team and there is the opportunity to either work alone or in a team, or both if you’d like to work on multiple projects over the few days.

The process starts with a brainstorming session the week before when we meet to throw down some ideas and thoughts and to get a rough plan of what we want to work on and who we might work with. When the hack days get underway, we’ll often start with a kick-off meeting to confirm what is to be worked on, and then we'll check in on progress mid-way through. At the end of the final day, we will have a demo session to show what we have done and decide if there are any ideas that might be worth pursuing.

We’re not the only company that works like this of course - there are rumours that both Gmail and the Facebook ‘like’ button arose initially as hack day projects! Clearly, if you give engineers time, space, and freedom then they can sometimes produce gold.

At Bright Network, we have had some extremely cool hack day results in the past including: a voice search bar for the Bright Network website, Bright Network Amazon Alexa integration, an instant messaging service for our partners, and a “Tinder-style” jobs application. There have also been some smaller ideas such as a Google Chrome link-clipper-style plugin for our internal team, and an estimated reading time feature for website articles, both of which were able to be implemented almost immediately following the hack days that produced them.

Hack days don’t always produce polished products, and sometimes they produce nothing at all! But engineers get the opportunity to learn and follow our interests for a few days and see where it takes us. I think it’s quite rare that tech teams in general get such an opportunity so frequently and I feel it’s maintaining that developer spark is imperative if you want a team who is genuinely passionate about the products they create and the quality of the code they write.

Our tech team has an extremely modern codebase that is maintained and reviewed frequently to ensure that we are staying up to date with the latest technology and software releases to give our users the best experience. Therefore we need engineers that are eager to work together to combine their skills in search of the next best product or feature. Hack days present an opportunity to work with members of the team that you may not get the chance to on a day-to-day basis, and you’ll often find that all parties involved have quite an exciting energy and drive to produce something worthwhile and useful.

Bright Network hack days have been, and will for a long time, be a source of excitement and enjoyment for our tech team. They give everyone the freedom to learn and collaborate in a creative and innovative manner where everyone’s input is valid, appreciated and praised no matter what the output.

How will you spend your first Bright Network hack day? Join our fast-growing tech team based in Edinburgh. Click below to see all current vacancies and to apply.