Remote-a-thon 2021
We did it again!
Another hackathon is in the books and a happy winning team have received their custom made background to celebrate their win at future online meetings 🎉
Once again we defied the lockdown and the work from home (or is it stay at work?) and organized a virtual hackathon.
It is still an entirely different event than the physical hackathon! It’s just not the same nice experience to sit by yourself instead of being crammed together around a desk with your team mates.
Some of our colleagues did manage to sit together and enjoyed the benefits of that 🍰
It’s always amazing to see the wide range of hackathon ideas from your colleagues.
We had projects focusing on improving customer experience, projects seeking to enhance developer productivity, Slack bots to improve invoices and then, a project focusing on a hardware appliance to find a lost iPhone.
Our engineers applied their many skills in Kubernetes, Java, React and even soldering.
This particular project required quite an unusual workspace setup for one of our engineers.
The hackathon followed our usual script:
- We invited everyone from our Product and Engineering department for the hackathon
- Teams submitted ideas and formed teams in the weeks leading up to the hackathon
- On the first day of the hackathon, we had a kickoff to ensure everyone was ready to go and had a team to work with
- After 2 days of hacking, we held regional competition, 2 in the EU and one in the US to find the regional winners
- The three winners presented at the global final the week after, where the jury selected a winner
This time around we also launched a People’s Choice Awards to allow the audience to select a winner.
So, it’s great that we can still do hackathon, even though it’s in a virtual setting.
But we are looking so much forward to giving high fives to the teams next time around.
Here’s hoping it will be possible for our next round in the autumn.
Until then, we can definitely enjoy the team Zoom screenshots our awesome colleagues grabbed for us 🙏
