Lesson: Intro to Hacking with Greg Osuri

Step: #1 The History: What is hacking? How did it start?

If you think about hacking, passwords for hacking your email. Hacking is about solving a problem and most often becomes the quickest way to solve a problem.

Certainly there are people that do that a lot and Hollywood was a huge contributor of making that phenomenon of hacking very famous. But hacking can apply to anything, hacking food, hacking life, hacking your toaster-oven, hacking anything.

When to hack is when you have an idea you want to get out as soon as possible. You want people to start using it, but maybe in a select group of users. But when you've finally proved that, "Yes this is working, let's go build a real product". So, that's when the more diligent approach comes into play and more product development discipline comes into play. Without hacking that wouldn't even exist. So hacking is the precursor, I would think, to product development.

Hacking is not when you know what exactly you are about to build and you have very well defined parameters for what you are about to build, and you have to build a full product and expect massive options for that project. That is something that I wouldn't quite call hacking. That would be product development. Hacking is fundamentally just getting straight to the goal.

For example if you want to build Instagram and you had this core assumption that adding filters on photographs makes a delightful picture or a good picture. In that case you would be hacking the filter and the photos, not necessarily the comments and the likes.

Getting to the end goal really fast is hacking. Once you have proven your hack then you go about building a product. Once you know what you are dealing with, putting a formal process around product development is when you don't hack. Hacking is not necessarily the best thing, when you have more than two or three people working for a continuous period of two or three months. You need to consider maintainability, you need to consider robustness and you need to consider good design, etc.