In November, the SaaS organization at SailPoint Technologies ran its 2nd hackathon for 2018 - 'Hack to the Future'. 44 crew members from engineering, DevOps, design, services and support came together to form teams and in under 2 days executed on a set of wide-ranging ideas - some related to work, some completely unrelated and fun but all extremely valuable to SailPoint.
The hackathons began and have continued as a way to take a break from regular enterprise product features and enhancements to stir up new ideas, innovate, reinvigorate and test/prototype promising ideas quickly.
Hackathon Day, Demos and Awards
What good is a hackathon without a great t-shirt?
We also had non-stop screening of 'Back to the Future' movie series to inspire!Day 1 began with a kickoff breakfast explaining rules and set up to teams. Teams then dispersed to go hack. With a snack bar, lunch and pizza for dinner there was ample nutrition for teams to go on into late evening hacking. Day 2 again involved tacos for breakfast and lunch, while the afternoon was reserved for idea presentations.With about 20 teams and a diverse set of projects, the attendance at the demos was impressive. All crew members including judges, executive sponsors and leadership carved out 3 hours from their busy schedules to absorb the results of the hackathon and understand how to maximize the impact of the ideas generated.We created six awards to focus on the theme and the specific behaviors we wanted to encourage with judging criteria for each:
The 'Goldie Wilson' Award - Most Engineering value
Winners - Rahul Mishra, Alex Kaszczuk, Krishna Namburi
Project - Analyze This. Client feature analytics
The 'Marty McFly' Award - Best related to the theme
Winners - Marty McFly's team Richard Li, Marcelo Herrera and Prashant Shetty
Project - Time Machine for All things Data.
The 'Doc Brown' Award - Most original project award
Winners - John Halter, Sam Bryan, Maria Garcia-Bodoh, Alex Jahns
Project - Train an AI Reinforcement Learning system to successfully play Atari games
The 'Lorraine' Award - Most complete and polished project
Winners - Dustin Yeager, Neil McGlennon, Rebecca Pacewicz, Rebekah Reveile, Hari Patel
Project - Data sucks. We can make it better.
The 'DeLorean' Award - Overall best project
Winner - Doug Olson
Project - Multi-tenant CCG
The 'George Mcfly' Award - Popular vote
Winners - Jeff Upton, Dustin Dobervich
Project - Event-sourced data-driven microservice discovery and monitoring dashboard
Key Takeaways
Gathering feedback via a survey post hackathon, generated some interesting insights - the majority surveyed agreed that the hackathon met its objective and that they would participate again.
The hackathon turned out to be a great opportunity to meet new colleagues within our growing team - about 20% of the participants were new to SailPoint. Cross-team exchange is valuable and like the last 2 Hackathons, it defied everyone's expectations - more participation, lots of new product ideas and loads of food and fun!
A Big Thanks To…
Hackathon planning team: Bill Bucher, Cole Beckwith, Maria Garcia-Bodoh, Sam Bryan, Dio Rodriguez
Poster and T-Shirt design: Justin Gingerella
Hackathon judges: Amar Rama, Marty Bowers, Chris Gossett, Matt Domsch, Steve Gregory, James Wommack
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Disclaimer
SailPoint Technologies Holdings Inc. published this content on 09 January 2019 and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 09 January 2019 19:33:06 UTC