Hackaday keeps the doldrums at bay.

Could your firm benefit from a hackathon?  From Bnoopy:

The idea is that you make a day-long event (at whatever frequency you want) where everyone works on something that is:

• valuable to the company
• but not what they're "supposed" to be working on and
• that can be taken from idea to working prototype in one day

We started our hackathon at 9:00am and ended at 8:00pm. From 8:00-10:00pm we did presentations where each team member or group showed their work.

We did our first hackathon last Thursday and the results were amazing. It's unbelievable what you can get done in a day with a focused, motivated and creative team.When you give people the time to do the thing that always seems "just out of reach" people's creativity cracks wide open. Check out the specific results here.

What was particularly cool was the energy it brought to the team. People felt envigorated and recharged. In fact, one of our engineers was so excited he exclaimed (during the presentations) "Dude, I just want to crawl into my hole [his cube], grow a beard, a build shit!". I couldn't have put it any better myself.