Ship It Days #9

You might have recently read about our monthly Scratch-itch Day and thought: “That sounds like fun”. Well, did you know that the Scratch-itch Day is based on an even bigger, more fun event called Ship-It Days (SID)? For many of our colleagues, who had joined in the last few years, this was also news. So, last month we had SID #9 (our first since November 2019) and it was our biggest one yet!

What is the Ship It Days event?

To quote the official docs:

The ShipIt Days (SID) is an internal hackathon that FindHotel organises roughly every six months. Participation is optional but strongly encouraged and is open to all FindHotel employees (not just engineers). You are welcome to team up with anyone you’d like, to take on any project you want. The focus is on delivering a tangible, fully-working product after the allocated two days. Ideally, this should be ready to ship soon afterwards.

What are the benefits?

SID has many benefits for our product and the FindHotel team:

• Many engineers take this time to try out a new tool or technology and implement a proof of concept (POC). Not only do they get to play around with a shiny new tool, but they can explore and assess if this new technology can benefit the team or our product.

• Often SID squads will work on projects with unknown impact, but that they believe to have big potential. In the usual day-to-day, these projects get delayed for being too risky. However, after implementing a POC the possible impact becomes clearer and dedicating resources toward it becomes much safer.
• Many cross-domain squads are formed for those two days and it is a good chance to get an insight into how other FindHotel roles work and the challenges they face.
• People get to work with colleagues they’ve never worked with before. Since we’ve been growing so much over the last few years, it has become more difficult to get to know every one of our colleagues. SID is a great opportunity to work with and get to know someone new.
• We end up with new features/improvements that are ready to ship and will improve the lives of our users and colleagues.

There are also the social aspects to consider:

• German, our CTO, makes sure that we start the day right: with fresh croissants in the kitchen.

• As is usual at FindHotel, SIDs are remote-friendly, but many colleagues choose to come to the office to experience the atmosphere. This year, for example, we had more people in the office than we’ve had since the start of the pandemic. So, it is a great chance to see everyone again and meet new people.
• In past SIDs, some people chose to stay at the office overnight, to make the most of those SID hours. We must be getting older because no one decided to do that this time around. Although, for those that do wish to work later, we have a catered dinner at the office. (We never say no to an opportunity to share a meal and a drink at FindHotel). I’m not sure how much work gets done after that, though.
• When the time is up and we are asked to put down our laptops, we get to demo what we’ve done. As with our usual weekly demo sessions, we all get together around a big screen of remote colleagues with a drink in hand, to see what we’ve achieved and celebrate.

What did we do this year?

During SID #9, we completed 13 projects, the most we’ve ever done. I guess that’s no surprise, considering how much we’ve grown since the last one. These included a variety of project types, from internal tools and knowledge bases to product improvements and brand new features.

Below are the four best projects as voted for by the FindHotel team:

• Rates and availability simulator — An internal tool that allows anyone in the company to see how the ranking of rates for a specific search was calculated.
• Location location location — Improvements to our location-based search results by using a polygon-matching algorithm to promote more relevant properties. This feature is on its way to one of our biggest A/B test wins in the last few years!

• FindHotel for Biz — A platform for enabling our special “Plus Deals” for employees from another company, thus implementing the first steps towards possible business-to-business partnerships.
• Wishlist and property sharing — A new website feature that allows users to create a wishlist of properties and share them with friends and family.

So, keep an eye out for some of these and other great new features coming to the FindHotel website soon. If the Ship-It Days event sounds like fun and you’d also like to build an exciting project along with great people and ship it within two days, take a look at our Careers page for a role that suits you.