It’s been a busy past few years here at Yelp Engineering. With our 10th anniversary this year and our recent launch in Chile, we think it’s safe to say we’re on to something. But it would be foolish of us to stop here. At the end of the day, we’re engineers: we live for the fact that there are still so many challenging problems to solve, features to improve, and datasets to explore. With the size of the projects we’re tackling nowadays, our Engineering and Product Management teams need to be in constant contact to coordinate development, testing, and release. We fully embrace the rapid iterative process customary of Agile, Scrum, and XP programming, so you’ll often see a product manager and engineer hashing an idea out at one of our large built-in whiteboards or in the team’s pod. Soon enough, though, we found ourselves with schedules like this:

makers-day-calendar

Coordination is incredibly important, but we also need time to actually build all those cool features we come up with. That’s why, about a year ago, we introduced Maker’s Day here at Yelp.

So what is Maker’s Day? The concept is pretty simple: meetings, interviews, and general interruptions aren’t allowed for engineers on Thursdays. Some teams even cancel standups on those days while others use them as a quick way to unblock folks so that there are fewer disruptions later on. If any questions come up, we use email instead of showing up at a person’s desk or pinging them over IM. Outside of those general guidelines, how engineers use Maker’s Day is really up to them: some make it into a long, uninterrupted coding period, others prefer it for reviewing designs and diving deep into a topic. And by the way, for those engineering managers out there, this applies to us, too.

We’re certainly not the first to come up with this idea. Back in 2009, Paul Graham, in his “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” post, wrote how the partners at YC Combinator were implementing the idea: “You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.” Craig Kerstiens of Heroku mentioned, as part of his How Heroku Works series, how the value of Maker’s Day had increased exponentially as the company had grown. Intel even jumped into the discussion with hard facts from their “Quiet Time” pilot. Closer to the Python Community, Daniel Greenfeld tweeted what everyone was thinking back in 2012:

So how has Maker’s Day done here at Yelp? We don’t have spreadsheets of numbers to prove its success. However, on Thursdays, you’ll notice the engineering floors are a tad quieter, and folks are eager to get to their desks and jump into whatever task they’ve lined up for that day. That’s enough for us to stick with it.

In the end, Maker’s Day was a good step, but we don’t think it’s the be-all end-all solution. Similar to our software development strategy, we’re also constantly iterating with our processes within Engineering. If you love thinking about these kinds of problems, we’re always looking for great Engineering Managers to help grow our talented team of engineers.

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