Tidying up a stack of old notebooks (as I narrowed down exactly the right type of notebook, I created strata by putting them all in one pile, going through it is like archeology). I’m back at 2007 and found my Yahoo work notebook.

Flicking through it is bringing back a lot of memories. I also found a page of notes from being on the Hack Day committee and I can trace the roots of @devfort in my head re-reading. The main note at the bottom of the page: “What is the point of Hack Day?”

I remember asking it and everyone being a bit “errr”. So I brainstormed it on the next page for myself later. And there’s two threads: focused development (leads to it being a remote offline place), making a difference (I always tried to do HD as a team not as an individual).

I also listed the downsides of Hack Day as a creative endeavour/“innovation” and one is also working piecemeal but in bigger type and underlined is that it is the worst way to do software — hyped up on too much caffeine and sugar to try to stay awake overnight.

Which leads directly to my main desire of Hack Day to instead be a week. Never happened at Yahoo. Vaguely remember Twitter doing them. But that’s where @devfort being a solid week comes from.

And the fort part of @devfort is entirely down to @dracos using placeholder slides of his holiday to Fort Clonque in a talk about captioning Parliament videos at Barcamp 4.

(Incidentally, the best notebook right now for me is the Lemome Grey dotted amazon.co.uk/Grey-Bullet-Jo… combined with a Papelote notebook strap to store pens in and keep it closed).