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Coursera: Our first internal hackathon at Coursera
Last week, we held our first internal hackathon at Coursera. What’s a “hackathon”? Well, it can take many forms, but it’s basically when a bunch of software engineers get together and hack on a particular project during a condensed period of time. Of course, we software engineers are always hacking on something, but we’re usually working on incremental updates to existing features or bug fixes, whatever is the highest priority project at the moment. During a hackathon, we get the opportunity to put all our main projects on the backburner for a few days, and work on something completely new and different. It’s a chance to try out ideas we’ve had milling at the back of our heads, to learn new technologies, and to work with colleagues outside our usual team. So, on Thursday at noon, we kickstarted our first hackathon with a round of pitches. We gave everyone exactly one minute to explain what they wanted to work on and why other people should j…