Well, it was a little drizzly and we couldn’t wear shorts (most of the time). Anyway …
120 devs from all over Unity ― most of whom showed up for the photo ― gathered for a services-oriented hack-a-thon. An event we dubbed HACKWEEK-FISH-TACO .
Who are these services-oriented individuals? What’s a hack-a-thon? Why are we so obsessed with fish tacos? Read on!
Services as a group are the part of Unity working to provide you value outside the Editor itself: ways to monetize, ways to understand, ways to speed up your productivity. Things like Unity Ads and Analytics, Connect and Cloud Build ― all the webby bits that allow you and your games to interact with and leverage the Net.
And the hack-a-thon? Well, ~51 weeks out of the year, we focus on a roadmap that brings you the features we believe you most want and need. Ideas are gathered, vetted, prioritized, and handed to the teams to work on. But this one week out of the year is different. On this week, the team members are in charge. They decide what they’re going to build no restrictions, no second-guessing, no PMs or marketers or CEOs telling them what to do. It’s just their ideas, their intuition, their passion, and they seriously go to the mat to bring those ideas to life (it’s a little like a brutalist version of Christmas).
While the week wasn’t strictly limited to web work, most of the projects found new and interesting ways to connect data to services that might someday make your life a little bit better.
To be clear, most hackweek projects never become full-fledged products, but we strongly believe that giving developers the chance to express their creativity and ideas inevitably yields great benefits for everyone.
Check out the trailer below to get a taste of the many projects dreamed up by our intrepid hackers!
Here’s a playlist with a sampling of the projects we worked on, if you want to go deeper. Oh, and the fish tacos? They were delicious!!!