Highlights from Data Hackathon 2022
At FanDuel, we’re constantly searching for innovative ways to solve our problems and take our offerings to the next level. One way to achieve this is by hosting regular hackathons across all teams.
At our recent data engineering hackathon event, we collaborated and shared ideas with colleagues from across all locations, and we had some fantastic new ideas and prototypes on show. So let’s take a look at them!
Building and exploring new ideas
Participants split into 7 teams with members from each part of the data organisation: UK and US locations, and Engineering and Product teams. They all had few weeks to think about what they wanted to achieve as a team, and 3 days of down tools from their normal projects to develop a prototype that aligns with one of the two themes:
- Make Data Engineering Easier, or
- Think Outside the Box.
2022 winners
We had 7 outstanding pitches, and two of them crowned as winners for this year’s data hackathon event.
People’s Choice Award
The People’s Choice Award is voted by all the employees who form part of the Data Organisation. With 28% of the total votes, team Data Gordians was the clear favourite of the crowd.
Data Gordian’s project tackled a real problem data engineers face — finding a way how to easily manage different third party sources that send us data with a chance of updating their structure on a regular basis. They took on the self-serving data platform we already have at FanDuel, and incorporated an easy way to manage these ever-changing APIs to it. With this approach, engineers can still take advantage of the platform benefits of reusable code, inbuilt testing frameworks, free observability and monitoring, and not having to manage third party APIs.
Congratulations to Keith Welch, Neeraj Vashistha and Shashank Singh for the idea and execution plan of this prototype!
Judges Award
The Judges Award is decided by the Data’s Leadership Team. And this year’s Judges Award went to team who worked on the theme of ‘Think Outside the Box’, and delivered a prototype that can take the data offerings to the next level.
With 35% of the votes in this category, huges congratulations goes to Marinos Kintis, Eduard Gibert Renart and James Stevenson from Team Panoptes, and their realtime streaming analytics prototype. This hackathon prototype builds on FanDuel’s existing data streaming platform capabilities, allowing for data to be turned into intelligence quicker, increasing operational effeciency, and boosting business agility.
A dynamic, progressive organisation
Congratulations goes not just to the winners, but everybody participated in this year’s event — there were some amazing ideas and prototypes developed in just few days! We aim to use the knowledge and skills we’ve gained from this year’s data hackathon event to improve our data offerings going forward.
It’s vital that we keep up with the latest technologies to allow us to continually improve our services. After all, technology is constantly progressing and it’s important that we progress with it. It’s also really important to invest in the development and skills of our staff, and this is only one of the many ways we try to achieve this at FanDuel.
If this is something that interests you, why not join us at FanDuel? Find out more about our open positions here at FanDuel by visiting this link.
