hackathon

we had a little hackathon yesterday at work and while i had enjoyed pitching some ideas a few weeks ago (i love brainstorming ideas and generating pitches), i had been growing increasingly apprehensive about a lack of structure and putting myself out there to find a team to work with me and the time limit (especially considering wildly divergent timezones) and how it would fit with all the other things i had to do, but it was so fun and has been reinvigorating. one of the things that's most frustrating about production work is how slow it can be, and there are reasons that it needs to be (you have to take care when you're touching something that will affect so many people who are paying you money), but finding a way for a small group of people to accomplish something tangible in a day and a half, having a support teammate do research and analysis, coordinating with skilled engineers who work in languages i don't know to build components of the prototype, and having a real (extremely talented) designer take work i'd blocked out and make it look better in ways i hadn’t imagined has been so rewarding and wonderful. it’s nice sometimes to leave work energized.