One of the things I like about IBM is the Think! Friday initiative,
which encourages people to use their Friday afternoons to learn about
something new.

My job is to think all the time—ah, the life of a grad student!—and
Think!Friday gives me that additional impetus to go out there and do
something.

A few Think!Fridays ago was Hack Day, an ad-hoc 5-hour hackathon
across IBM. I built a social discovery web application that took a
list of e-mail addresses, names, Lotus Notes mail IDs and even
community IDs. Given a list of people, the tool displayed the latest
three blog headlines and bookmarks for people who used the internal
blogging and bookmarking services. I'd been meaning to build it for a
few weeks, and thanks to the enthusiastic Hack Day vibe, I finally
made the time to hack it all together.

Fast forward to today. IBMers voted on their favorite Hack Day hacks.
Mine won Best Mashup! That made me ridiculously happy. It was a simple
hack—most of the time was spent writing libraries to interact with
IBM's services and figuring out how to resolve different kinds of
names—but it turned out to be quite useful for finding people.
Throwing it all together in Ruby was a lot of fun, too. Ruby makes my
brain happy.

Hack Day was a terrific way for me to meet a lot of other early
adopters and geeks within IBM. We presented our hacks in two
teleconferences, and that was awesome.

Today, I decided to deal with some of the other little projects I'd
been meaning to do. I set up RSS2Email (Python) and made it easier for
people to have comments on their blog e-mailed to them. Again, a
simple hack (took me a leisurely hour or so)—but I think it will have
a lot of benefit. I also wrote a little Ruby script that summarized my
bookmarks in bloggable form. Happy!

I like days like this a lot. I like sensing the need for a little tool
and writing that tool. I like being in the zone, trying things out,
geeking out, creating something useful…

Happy girl. =)