Hack Week 1.0: What, Why & How
Last year, we did our first ever Hack Week at Worldsensing and it turned out to be an energising, productive week. In this post we will share the details of our experience in case you are thinking about doing something similar in your company or are interested in how hack weeks are organised.
What’s a Hack Week? — Bottom Up
A Hack Week is a chance for teams to work on ideas which they believe are powerful enough to impact the company or to focus on a particular product instead of working on the official roadmap.
These ideas can be a new tool or technology our teams wanted to explore, an awesome new product feature, a process improvement, or anything else that will help improve Worldsensing (insert your company name here if you are thinking about doing one) as a whole.
Why should you do a Hack Week? — Continue discovering & innovating
At Worldsensing we are passionate about technology and innovation. Our engineers have introduced novel ideas and transformed them into actual products for the past 10 years. Some fine examples are Fastprk and Loadsensing, world-class, low-power IoT products that are revolutionizing smart cities & IIoT spaces.
We have also recently been working on Mobility, a powerful, agile, end-to-end solution that is helping cities connect urban operations to make faster and more intelligent decisions.
As we grow as a company (and we are growing rapidly; check out our Careers page if you are interested) there’s no natural time for everyone to invent and discover, we thought it would be a good idea to break away from the regular routine and hack for a solid week to see how far we could go and what we could achieve.
Ideas that we never had an opportunity to flesh out before because we were too busy with our normal work — these were exactly what the Hack Week was made for!
How did we bring Hack Week to life? — Collaborate, engage, work hard, party hard
Collaborate
We designed the Hack Week to be collaborative so we could break the silos between our different Scrum teams and foster engagement with the other departments.
This time ideas came from the Engineering team, but we are planning to open it to the rest of the organisation for the second edition. Of course Engineers could join freely whichever team and project they liked.
Engage
We created a supervising committee whose role was to shape and direct the presented projects to maximise the impact on our products and services. We also had some mentors from the business who provided guidance to the teams regarding the landscape of the market, business strategy or other useful product insights.
Work Hard — The Projects
A couple of weeks before the Hack Week, we started organizing ideas over lunch when people could freely and casually brainstorm about the different projects.
Below is an overview of the projects that we decided to work on.
GPS Monitoring — A new monitoring system to measure accurate positions of a set of wireless GPS sensors localized in our Loadsensing product network
Voice Recognition — Integration of voice recognition technology into Mobility, and made it so we could use the technology for all our products
Indoor tracking — Indoor asset tracking (vehicles, people or machinery) for large deployments like mines or other big indoor environments
Harvesting — A solution to power our Loadsensing product using a solar panel making it durable and eco-friendly
Radar — New methodologies for car detection and enhancements on signal processing for our Parking product
GTA Integration — An integration of Grand Theft Auto with Mobility to test and demonstrate all the capabilities in a virtual environment
NB-IoT — A prototype of our parking sensor using Narrow Band IoT
Infrastructure Real Time Insights — Logging, metrics & monitoring for our infrastructure using BRELK, TICK and SIRR stacks
Party Hard
On the last day, we invited everyone in Worldsensing to be part of the Demos presentation, all the team showed their projects and we made everyone a part of the success in the Hack Week.
Important to note that, being the first time ever organising a Hack Week in the company, there was initial skepticism as to what the quality of the ideas and projects would be, but everyone was impressed about how aligned and close to the future technology & product roadmap the different initiatives ended up being. I believe it shows just how mature our team is!
The Results
An image is worth a thousand words and this awesome video shows you the results and so much more.
It was indeed a very productive week. We learned and experimented a lot and we are proud to say that some of the ideas that we worked on during the Hack Week will eventually become part of our product portfolio.
Special thanks to our marketing team for the amazing logo, video and t-shirts, you rock!
You can follow Worldsensing on LinkedIn, Twitter and Youtube for future updates on the developments for these exciting projects, or if you would like to work with us and be a part of our next Hack Week. See you soon!
