The whole Agoric team took a week off work. Not because of the pandemic. Not for a vacation. Not for a mental-health break. We took off work to take part in a hackathon. Specifically, an internal hackathon. At Agoric we develop tools (called Zoe and ERTP) for building and trading digital assets. We recognized that doing our own internal hackathon where we were the participants, rather than just the sponsors, would be beneficial for various reasons, among them:

• We’d learn what our users experience with our software tools

   — because we’d have to use the tools ourselves.

• We’d all get better at our tools

   — because we’d take a break from being individual specialists and for the week be a team of generalists.

• We’d improve our offering

   — because everything we learned would be funneled back into what we do, not just into the tools, but the user experience, the documentation, everything.