Nesthaton 2.0
Oh yeah, we did it again!
A few weeks ago we hosted the second Nest Hackathon. For us, doing this kind of event, with colleagues from all the Collective companies, is not only a great way to spend some quality time, bonding and doing some team building, but it is also a great chance to improve our workspace.
The plan was simply to gather everyone on friday afternoon, create teams and discuss project ideas, gathered during the previous week. Then we’d follow right away to the dream and make it come true part. We try to do it with the minimum amount of structure in order to give people the responsibility to manage their time, goals and resources in their own way.
The previous edition 🍍
The Nestathon is becoming some kind of a ritual for us. Last year we did it for the first time and it went amazingly well. We built the Smallest Disco, started Intern.Camp, a mobile app to manage some in house resources, a face recognition app to open the door and a slack bot to count the people in the kitchen.
The first event was a great excuse to get everyone working together on a more informal setting, to know a bit more about each other and enjoy an amazing sunset. So, we did it again.
This year 🍍🍍
This year we’ve decided to call some friends. So, apart from all the Nest Collective members we have invited our interns, both from the 2017 and the 2018 Summer Internship. While not everyone was able to attend we gathered more than twenty people in the lobby, which was carefully set up for the occasion.
By the end of the afternoon everyone joined around for the ideas pitch and to choose teams. Although we had a few great ideas, only 7 of them proceeded.
Fix CHEAPR bugs — built during the summer internship of 2015, Cheapr is a great way to track the price of products available online. But it was not working at all.
Shot counter — it’s simple, count the shots each company drinks.
Projections Secret Project — create animations and test projections in different places of the office.
The mixer — a device that blends 4 bottles of liquor together in one unique glass of shot.
Zain Talks website — at Nest we organize a quarterly event in which we invite speakers from the realm of design to talk about their work experience.
Internal platform to manage business leads — at Nest we also share business between all the companies, but we are looking for a better way to do it and to follow-up.
Lobby meeting room — we need another space where we can meet, so let’s find a solution.
Winners 🏆🏆🏆
The 24 hours hackathon finished on Saturday evening. But minutes before closing the competition, only a few groups were working flat out. The Cheapr team managed to fix all the bugs 🐞 and deploy the project before lunch. Sara was packing to leave to São João 🔨 🎉 and the leads platform team was chilling 🖖 with some AngularJS code. But Dinis was struggling to make the camera facial recognition work 🥃, and the meeting room team was drilling and assembling furniture ⚒.
Eventually everyone finished what they were doing and we started the final pitch. Unfortunately, while most of the projects were a success, only the best 3 could win the prize. And they deserved it!
And that’s it! It was a great event for all that attended and we have an improved workspace. A new awesome meeting room which can easily turn into a chill space, the beginning of the platform that will help us manage future leads, the first iteration for the Zain Talks website and other things that contribute to a better Nest.
What do you think about our Nesthaton? Do you want to attend? Share your opinion with us.
