Have you heard about hackathons? According to wikipedia, hackathon or “hack days” is an event where software engineers including designers, project managers and everyone else collaborate actively on a project. It is also a term that used for more organized innovative effort. Hackaton organizations goes back to roots of open source software. I can see a growing interest in hackatons as an organization of a specific effort to create a new software or make a significant progress in a project collaboratively.
TechCrunch article Which programming languages get used most a hackathons? gives you an interesting outline of tools and services people are using these days to hack future systems and products. Navigate to the following link to get a full research list. Among platforms, programming languages, databases and communication frameworks I was a bit surprised to see Autodesk services (Well done Autodesk!). None of other providers of platforms, APIs and services from engineering world wasn’t mentioned. You can also see a growing number of hardware platforms, which gives you an indication of large number of hardware development.
The section related to APIs caught my special attention.I’ve been talking about Web APIs yesterday in my blog – PLM and spreadsheetware. Take a look on the picture below
Communication APIs, social APIs, payment APIs, Geo APIs. This is where web programming environment is heading these days. Web APIs and RESTFul services. Combined with agile development methods it gives you a good foundation how to develop open systems. Do you remember my old post – Is PLM customization a data management titanic? For the last five years, CAD and PLM industry moved forward with development of SaaS applications and services. It is a time to turn SaaS applications into consumable web APIs and services that can be re-used to hack a better PLM experience.
What is my conclusion? The time when companies developed system for 2-3 years to bring them to the market is probably over. The idea of hackatons and agile development is compelling. It can be used for new product development and hacking of service based products to solve a specific problem. Manufacturing is going into networking future and no-stack software era. To provide a set of consumable open services can become extremely important. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
