LinkedIn announced their first Women’s Hackday— DevelopHer, and it will be hosted from June 30 – July 1, 2012. DevelopHer is a public competition for female engineers to unite by hacking all night, eating food and doing yoga, meeting judges, and competing in Silicon Valley.
The networking site is encouraging engineering students, enthusiasts, professionals, and interns to participate in the event and demonstrate their talents.
Women who desire to participate must request an invitation to do so.
In the following YouTube video LinkedIn engineers describe Hackday as ” a special day each month where every engineer across the company is given permission and actually encouraged to work on something new and innovative.”
Other engineers comment that the event:
“Makes you a better engineer.”
Helped them realize that “it is amazing what you can learn from some of the people you work with.”
“[Gave them] a real sense of the global nature of [LinkedIn’s] professional community.”
Prachi Gupta, is a Hackday master at LinkedIn and decided to share her passion for engineering to generate interest in the event: “Throughout my student life and career as an engineer, I’ve loved participating in programming contests. There’s nothing like the rush of cracking a difficult problem, but over time programming contests started feeling rigid and I realized I was more interested in producing creative solutions to meaningful problems and not just code.This is when I discovered hackdays and fell head over heels for them.”
Gupta says she loves Hackdays because they give her the opportunity to create strong personal bonds, test her physical and mental limits, and work closely with teammates. She portrays LinkedIn as a company that encourages creativity and innovation: “All employees are free to work on any idea they are passionate about.”
She also relishes the chance to compete: “Everyone gets together to demo their hacks in front of the entire company and senior tech leaders vote on the ideas and pick winners.”
Some of the products on LinkedIn and LinkedIn Labs started out as hacks.