Hackathon at the Synerise Office
So many choices, you end up not knowing which one you want — Black Mirror
Twisted, high-tech innovations turn against people and humanity discovers the dark side of the technology. Further development of the whole civilization is at stake.
Exaggerated stories that depict destruction caused by the spiral of innovations send chills down the spine. The stories inspire anxiety and make us wonder if we would ever live to see them happening in the real life…
Does it sound familiar? Yes, this is the popular Black mirror series, which was the inspiration of the Synerise hackathon.
Though I got off to a gloomy start, we took the best out of the Black Mirror theme. A constant brush with the latest technology in the series doesn’t turn out well for the characters and it is a lesson we wanted to take a closer look at. Our special forces brainstormed their ideas on making our application even more helpful and bridging the gap between customer expectations and ease of use. They got together into four teams, each working on their own promising ideas.
What were we working on?
The first team focused on the primary needs of our co-workers, which is food. They addressed the issue of notifying everyone in the office about the arrival of Mrs. Sandwich, our lunch and snack provider. Her arrival usually gets a quick reaction as it’s announced by word of mouth and everyone rushes to make it to her before all the good stuff is gone.
As a way of solving this matter, the developers created a mobile application based on Android SDK able to communicate with Slack. The correct data exchange is facilitated by a processor that converts communications between the mobile application and Slack. To create this feature, the developers used features available in Synerise, such as documents, automation and campaigns. All these let Mrs. Sandwich use ready-made scenarios in the mobile application, which she sends to let us know where she is (on her way, just arrived, last call to make a purchase and exit) or to collect orders to organize the appropriate number of meals for the next day.
Bringing a certain efficiency to the way we get our lunch delivered might be an odd way to demonstrate the flexibility of the Synerise application, but the same easy principles of streamlining sandwich distribution can be applied to much more complex business processes. With ready-made scenarios and a simple user interface, implementing ideas for your workspace or application has never been easier.
The second team focused on anomaly detection, which is crucial for the uninterrupted functioning of the Synerise application. It allows us to quickly react to the issue and bring back proper functionality. As the team members stressed, they also focused on limiting the number of false-positive alarms which have a tendency to diminish our vigilance.
One of their tasks was to evaluate anomaly detection tools. To do that, as input they used transactional data from several months back. The tools were trained with the input data so they could predict anomalies related to the transaction number. After the most efficient tool was identified, the team prepared a prototype that sends alerts when the anomaly is detected. The solution they developed would ultimately work for all kinds of anomaly detection metrics such as response times, connection maintenance, etc.
The third Frontornado team dedicated themselves to creating a working prototype of the mobile Synerise application.
The prototype allowed users to log in to the application, choose a business profile, display basic information on the main dashboard, display the campaign dashboard, funnel lists, the funnel preview, list of customers and basic details from customer cards.
Last, but not least, team prepared an analytical tool that allows the users of the Synerise application to analyze the most popular data points (events, in other words, customer-related activities). The development process was fruitful not only with the data point analysis tool but also with other crucial features such us event filters, time range filters, filtering metrics with positive results. This feature will be released soon.
Powered by countless slices of pizza, all groups successfully completed their tasks within their two-day deadlines. They did a tremendous job and it was quite a tough nut to crack for the committee to select a winning team.
And the winner is…
Eventually, after a long consultation they decided that the award went to the Mrs. Sandwich mobile app. This hackathon, although with a slightly dark overtone, was the first initiative in the company of this kind and it definitely make us excited about the next to!
Originally published at synerise.com on 18.12.2019
