What do you get when you combine awkward developers with awkward comedians in a single room over a weekend?

Comedy Hack Day, of course.

Participants pitched their comedy hack ideas on Friday evening, and as per my nature, I wanted to work on *everything*, so I initially had trouble deciding on a team. I started helping out a bit with the members of what turned out to be the winning team (go Timesify!) before they switched ideas, but then I decided to commit to working with my friend @nicolethenerd on her idea:

Microsoft Clippy — FOR THE INTERNET.

The project was affectionately named Browser Companion on github, and these were my contributions:

Have you ever wanted Ryan Gosling as a constant companion while you surfed the web? No? Yes? What about a Golden Snitch that moved when you hovered over it? (My other idea was to add in a helpful Rubber Duck (TM) for programmers, but alas, we ran out of time.)

The browser companions would also appear with snarky quips which the two comedians on our team had written up if you landed on certain designated websites, and we had other characters too — including Browser Bro and Subway Rat.

I learned the basics about how to create a chrome browser extension, and learned from working with the code of a more experienced javascript developer. @nicolethenerd also did an excellent job presenting. Our comedy hack didn’t advance to the final day’s round of seven presentations on Sunday, but we got an honorable mention — which meant we were probably 8th-10th place in a round of 23 demos.

By the way, if you’re interested in participating in another Comedy Hack Day this year, they’ll be in San Francisco and LA later in 2014. Sign up to stay informed: http://www.comedyhackday.org/

And to give you an idea of what it was like (since videos from this year haven’t been uploaded yet), here’s a hilarious demo from a previous year’s presentation: