When Food, Ideas and Code Come Together, SailPoint Crew Members “Hack to the Future”

In November, the SaaS organization at SailPoint Technologies ran its 2^nd 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?

Meredith Volk working on “What would Mark say?”

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.

“Your Face Here” Team hacking – Charles Mims, Roddy Toomim, Bill Gooch, Mitch Birti (L-R)

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.

“Flux Capacitor Data Analysis” Team hacking – Hari Patel, Rebekah Reveile, Dustin Yeager, Neil McGlennon (L-R)  Rebecca Pacewicz under the table

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

Doug Olson wins the The “DeLorean” Award – Overall best project and trophy

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