Tele2 Unlimited Hack
The idea of Unlimited Hack was to keep have hack days at our Tele2 Kista office. We wanted to merge the previous events Com Hem Hackacom and Tele2 Hackdays to something even bigger, funnier and more exciting. The name of the new event was for anyone to come up with and Unlimited Hack was soon established — and we found it great!
Innovation and collaboration — The two keywords we chose to promote Unlimited Hack with.
We all know that developers are pretty keen on getting their hands on new stuff that gives value to their stakeholders. Could we get our developers to work with someone new to them as well? We believe that collaborating around fun activities that deliver value at the same time is a great way to help achieve the ”togetherness” and ”WE-culture” we seek at Tele2. Post-merger culture is a challenge, but a challenge we willingly accept!
Unlimited Hack was preceded by two ideation events with the purpose to get people starting to brainstorm and building on each other’s ideas. The outcome of this was more than 300 ideas, of varying level of feasibility, written on flipcharts. To spread the playful feeling we wanted to have, these flipcharts were put up on walls around the office for everyone to be inspired from.
When the first day of the two-day hack finally was here, more than one hundred attendees had registered, we had 1080 energy drinks chilled and one barista on the 7th floor ready to serve coffee. The event was kicked off at the Arena with elevator pitches by people who wanted to share their ideas. They were rewarded with goodie bags including t-shirts, balloons and stickers which helped us spot the hackers in the building!
The first day people were spreading the good vibes of having fun all over the office while doing great stuff. People worked on building new apps or new functions that could serve us in different ways. A screen saver with your service/s dashboard/s was one of the things being worked on. It is supposed to be used on either big monitors or on your own laptop, to keep track of how your services are doing as often as possible, in a daily and natural way. Also to see the real impact of your changes in the code and find problems and abnormalities quickly.
Another more playful project was done by a team that installed a Raspberry Pi to monitor and track the movement on the pool table at the top floor. Now you can check if it´s free to play pool by visiting their app. Basically — there were no rules for what to work on!
When the time was in to have our after work, people gathered at 7th floor for some pizza, beer and the opportunity to talk about their hack projects — and also discuss how to challenge their fears of having demos in the Arena the next day :D
On day two of Unlimited Hack, the work on all different projects continued. The hacking teams also prepared for an awesome demo of their work, and at 13:00 it was time for the expo session where 13 different projects were exhibited. People from all different departments came to listen in to all the exciting ideas that had been worked on. After the exhibition, it was time for the bravest ones to stand up and demo their work for everyone, at our own Arena here in our Kista office. Eight fantastic presentations were done, and of course, the demo devil was visiting us, but that did not scare us — we proceeded with great success! :)
The event ended by management thanking all hackers for their participation and more or less promised more time to work on the unfinished projects. Some of the projects will also be looked at as possible candidates for making it all the way to production. In other words — the hack was really successful and we already look forward to the next hack!
Martin Lindhe, Scrum Master & Eleni Kiriakaou, Agile Coach
