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