Last month I got the chance to spend part of a week doing a Hackathon. For those that have never heard of a Hackathon, it is where you work to solve a computer problem over the course of a couple days. My company sponsored the event and so I got to put down my normal work and play with something completely new. We had food brought in so we could continue to work through lunch and dinner. We also had plenty of snacks so we didn't have to worry about eating at all.
I partnered up with a couple of guys I eat lunch with on a daily basis. We all work on different projects in the department and so we picked a problem that was fun to solve and spanned each of our specialties. Unfortunately I can't go into detail on what we did as it may be covered by a non-disclosure agreement I signed when I started working at the company over eight years ago. I can tell you we had a lot of fun and learned some new and useful skills.
If you find yourself wanting to expand your technical abilities, I highly suggest participation in a Hackathon. Then pick a problem to solve somewhat related to your normal work but include other tools or pieces. If you spend all your time working on software, see if you can't work with some hardware kits like Raspberry Pi or Arduino. At my Hackathon, I ended up becoming quite skilled with an electric carving knife, a hot-glue gun, and camping mattress foam. Did I mention I had a lot of fun.
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