Our latest Vodafone Hackathon
8 teams. 1 day. Lots of code.
For those unfamiliar with the term, a Hackathon presents an opportunity for software engineers, designers, testers etc. to come together and solve business problems in a design-sprint like event. Here’s a quick summary of our latest one!
The aim for our teams was to produce a working prototype over the day and present back to a panel of judges — where the winners would receive Amazon vouchers (and bragging rights of course). 🎉
Hacking is creative problem solving.
For our latest hackathon, we asked team members to go above and beyond 🚀solving problems — to unleash their creative ability.
Firstly they were asked to raise ideas — we broadly used the following questions to get the creative juices flowing —
🔹I wish I could …
🔹If only I could take time to fix …
🔹It’s such a pain that …
Once ideas were collated, team members were encouraged to speak to team leaders and ask to help — we tried to encourage cross team/discipline working. We made a Slack channel, where anyone could join — ask questions, suggest further ideas and improvements — it was great to see such passion and enthusiasm for change.
The aim here was to get as many individuals involved — picking projects that interest and excite them. It was a perfect opportunity to try something different and propose new and exciting ideas.
We eventually landed on 8 ideas, below are just a few of them —
🤖 Support Slackbot with NLP and Automate Test Plugins.
Ability to respond to common queries and provide automated smoke tests against team environments through Slack. Using a combination of Slack, Azure DevOps, Phyton, AWSand Dialogflow.
✏️ Simple Interface for Test Data Creation
Enable teams to create a simple front-end interface for creating and editing test data. Starting with a simple user creation form, moving on to see if we can add searching/table view, editing users etc. This could reduce time spent obtaining test data for teams to work with.
🏎 Component library performance and usability improvements
Ability to change our core component library to use Lerna JS to publish each component as its own package to make small changes easier to get released instead of having to release the whole library each time.
📆 End of year performance tracker
Create a PWA (Progressive Web App) with reminders that allows better usability experience to track, add and modify end of year goals and achievements.
We kicked off at midday — giving teams the afternoon (and any additional evening time they wanted to give up) and the following morning to produce their ideas. The following afternoon we went into presentations, giving teams 15 minutes to present their idea and demo their prototype.
And the winner is… 🏆
All the presentations and ideas were fantastic, we were truly blown away at the approach, dedication and innovation on show.
We gave an honourable mention to one team who presented a fantastic improvement to our checkout, but I can’t go into too much detail on that (Think of it like our secret blend of 11 herbs and spices 🐔).
But… our overall winner was 🥁🥁
Gamification of Objectives led by Radoslaw Swiat. The team developed a system to gamify team culture and engagement which will encourage employees to go that extra mile.
Using three.js they implemented a territory based game where team members could earn points by doing tasks, such as attending demo’s, meeting new team members or approving PRs. Teams could then compete against each other to control areas of map as well as competing internally to control areas within their own controlled areas.
Over the next few months teams have been encouraged to reflect on this hackathon and take opportunities within their own squads, similar to what Raptors did with ILS in a Day. Till next time 👋
