This summer, Microsoft’s Online Services Division (OSD) held its First Annual Hack Day for interns at Bing, Bing Mobile and MSN. The competition gave teams of interns a single day to collaborate and create a new app. Over forty interns showed up to demonstrate 9 apps. The People’s Choice prize was awarded to Peter Huang, Jessica Leung, Daphne Ezer,
Genuine Office 2010, Zhiyong “Joe” Xie and Etienne Le Grand for building the Sidecar app. Below, the team discusses Hack Day,
Genuine Windows 7, interning at Microsoft and the Sidecar app in their own words.Tell us about Hack Day.
The great thing about Hack Day is that you get to work in teams with fellow interns: coming up with a design, dividing the work,
Office Home And Student 2010, helping each other with bugs and selling the feature. You go through all the steps a typical feature team goes through and, best of all,
Office 2007 Key, you get to do it with friends!
-Jessica Leung Hack Day is a great souvenir of the internship as it was an opportunity to imagine, design and demonstrate a system end to end. It was exciting to work as part of a small team of amazing interns with different backgrounds and skills.
-Etienne Le Grand What was your process to create the Sidecar app?
We had a meeting the day before Hack Day to brainstorm ideas and read up on the Sidecar API. We liked this idea the best, because it was innovative,
Office Professional, easy to code up in one day and would be a technology that would appeal to people our age.
-Daphne Ezer We divided up the project into three parts and had an entire Friday to work on it. Since our app was a chat client, it needed a server, a client GUI and client logic. Etienne and I worked mostly on coding a simple server in PHP, Daphne created the GUI for the client, and Jessica and Zhiyong implemented the client logic.
-Peter Huang Hack Day was one of many things that the team enjoyed during their summer time at Microsoft. Daphne also liked being an intern because she was “doing work that a real Microsoft fulltime employee would do.” Others noted how they enjoyed the sponsored events for interns, such as Puzzle Day and a private showing of Cirque du Soleil. Peter praised Microsoft's "informal work environment" and the fact that interns "get a lot of freedom.” He said, “ After all, there aren’t that many super successful companies that let you play ping pong at work."