Originally published at: https://blog.metageek.net/2020/05/diy-day-may-2020/
Friday May 15 was DIY Day at MetaGeek! DIY Day started in August 2018, and this was our 9th iteration.
What is DIY Day? Dumb Idea of Yours Day! It’s a whole day for the geeks to work on making their crazy ideas a reality.
How does it work? On Friday mornings we’ll all gather in the Galley remotely and give a quick overview of our Dumb Idea and outline what we plan to do to make it real. We work all day on mockups, prototypes, websites, dashboards, or whatever else we think we need to find out if maybe this idea isn’t so dumb after all. In the late afternoon, we reconvene with a Friday afternoon beverage of choice and present what we’ve built.
Why Dumb Ideas? We are looking for things that are new and different. We are looking for ideas that seem crazy. We are looking for things that have nothing to do with what we do. The best ideas usually turn out to be the ones that “will never work” or “no one will want.”
What if a geek doesn’t have a Dumb Idea? They usually do (see above), but if they find theirselves falling in love with somebody else’s dumb idea during the morning thinking out loud session, they can join forces.
What are we going to do with these ideas? We’ll see. Some will turn out to be dead-ends (they are Dumb Ideas, after all). We’re still experimenting with some of them. A bunch of DIY ideas have become tools we use inside of MetaGeek, and a handful have made their way into our products that MetaGeek customers are using today. Here are some examples:
- Proof of concept for what eventually became Rampart
- Bakery – customer support superadmin portal for MetaGeek Plus
- A brainstorming app called ThrashCan
- Client Packet Analytics in inSSIDer
- MetaMeet Meeting facilitation consultancy
- “Walk the Line” Police DUI app proof of concept
- Integration of payroll system with accounting system
- inSSIDer for Mac, experiment with native packet capture for Mac
- WLANPi support in inSSIDer