About
What is Team Hack-a-Day?
Team Hack-a-Day is a loosely affiliated group of computer and technology enthusiasts who originally met through the Hack-a-Day blog community. Our goal is to combine the vast amount of our computer’s otherwise unused CPU cycles via a process known as distributed computing to solve computationally large and complex problems. When combined, the aggregate power of our team’s unused CPU cycles creates a virtual supercomputer which is used in a friendly competition between other teams in various distributed computing efforts.
Our current distributed computing project is the Folding@Home project which is headed by the Pande Group: an association of computer science, biological engineering, and chemical engineering professors from Stanford University. The goal of this project is to study the folding mechanics of biomolecular proteins which dictates the functionality of life’s most basic building blocks. The answers to these foldings and misfoldings may hold the cure for numerous deadly diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers which have plagued humanity throughout history and still pose a threat to this day.
History
Though much of the early memories in the history of Team Hack-a-Day have been lost in the fog of human memory, the founding members are still some of the most active participants to this day: BillytheImpaler and GoliathDrakken. After much nagging, numerous threats, and an eventual bribe consisting of 768 pints of lager and a fainting goat, BillytheImpaler outlined a rough approximation of the humble beginnings to our now thriving group.
Defection from SETI@Home
The story of Team Hack-a-Day begins on or around July 25, 2005. After being becoming disillusioned participants in the SETI@Home project both BillytheImpaler and GoliathDrakken decided to switch to the Folding@Home distributed computing project. Several team names were considered, including Team Borg and Dayton Flyers after GoliathDrakken attempted to recruit some team members from school. At this time the only active participants in the Folding@Home team stood at a paltry three members: BillytheImpaler, GoliathDrakken, and GoliathDrakken’s brother.
Taking an Unauthorized Chance
After being wholly unable to actually attract team members the old fashioned way, the two founders came up with another idea. Both were avid readers of the Hack-a-Day blog, so on a whim they changed the name of the Folding@Home team to Team Hack-a-Day and both submitted the information via the Hack-a-Day tip line.
On September 4, 2005 Eliot Phillips (the maintainer of Hack-a-Day) submitted a posted entitled “hackaday links” which contained several links to technical projects and a link to the Team Hack-a-Day statistics page at Stanford:
“some readers have put together a hack-a-day folding@home team. hmm… there’s something odd about that logo.”
Slowly, interest in this new Team Hack-a-Day began to grow. BillytheImpaler described the thrill expereinced with the sudden growth of the team, “In the next few days I was going bananas because we were up to 12 users. Bananas I say!”
A Guide is Born
As the membership in Team Hack-a-Day grew so did the questions in the limited confines of the Hack-a-Day comments section. People were obviously going to need help, and BillytheImpaler offered his services. “I posted in a comment that I’d like to do a writeup. Eliot wrote me an email and said he’d post it if I wrote it. One Saturday afternoon when I was bored at home I sat down and wrote up the original how-to and e-mailed it to Eliot.”
The following Tuesday on September 13, 2005 BillytheImpaler’s guide was posted to Hack-a-Day as a full article entitled “how-to: folding@home competitively“. Following the posting of this article Team Hack-a-Day experienced an explosion in growth and membership quickly swelled to over 300 members. Team Hack-a-Day had truly arrived and easily blossomed into the largest growing team in the Folding@Home project.
A Separate Entity
Within a relatively short amount of time the comments within the “how-to: folding@home competitively” article began to reach a point of inefficiency. Seeing a chance to help out, team member Pocketlnt set up an unofficial Team Hack-a-Day forum on his personal webspace. On October 27th, 2005 Pocketlnt posted a message in the “how-to: folding@home competitively” article with a link to the forum, and as Team Hack-a-Day members began to congregate in this new location Team Hack-a-Day began to define itself as a related but separate entity from Hack-a-Day.
As time passed Eliot purchased and donated the domain name teamhackaday.com to the team, and Team Hack-a-Day grew to the point of requiring the purchase of their own web hosting package. The Team Hack-a-Day community now consists of this web portal/blog system, highly active forums, a live chat room, and an informational Wiki, along with over 1500 participants, several active developers, and a global ranking in the top 30 Folding@Home teams worldwide.
