Today we wrapped up our first company-wide Hackathon and I felt it worthy of a short blog while the judges deliberate over who had the best project… It’s not about winning anyways, right?
Wrapping up the #BugcrowdHackDay with team demos. Many creative, impressive projects across the company. pic.twitter.com/79pegwOU6R — bugcrowd (@Bugcrowd) February 22, 2017
Wrapping up the #BugcrowdHackDay with team demos. Many creative, impressive projects across the company. pic.twitter.com/79pegwOU6R
— bugcrowd (@Bugcrowd) February 22, 2017
All-in-all I was amazed by the outstanding participation (33%–not bad for our first time), with lots of folks working on multiple projects–21 projects in all. Beforehand, a few people explicitly said their goal was to make as many ‘small impacts’ on different projects as possible. That they did.
What was most exciting, however, was the variety in projects. From a slackbot-connected, voice-enabled mannequin to business-critical projects, it was great seeing the diversity amongst my colleagues. Although the final projects were clever and solved interesting problems, what was more insightful to me was the fact that they gave me a glimpse into my colleagues’ different ways of thinking. Here are a few takeaways from the final presentations…
BONUS: Slackbots for everything.
So, what’s next? We’re planning on holding these Hackathons quarterly, which to be honest, sounds exhausting. Exciting… but creativity is exhausting.
At the end of the day, this was an excellent opportunity for us to work with folks we don’t get to work with regularly and spend some time solving interesting problems in interesting ways. I look forward to seeing this grow beyond our technical teams to see what other inventive ideas we have brewing across the company.
As always, remember to “build it like you own it.”