mkodo 2021 Hackathon
20210115
On January 13th 2021 we hosted our first twenty-four hour hackathon.
This event was open to all team members and in total we had over 30 participants. Software Engineers, Quality Assurance Engineers and Designers all took part, either as individuals or in cross-functional teams.
An event such as a hackathon has many beneficial outcomes. Firstly, we gave everyone the opportunity to show off their incredible talents. It encouraged people to use their imagination to create and deliver interesting and unique ideas/solutions that they could take ownership of. It enabled people to work with technologies that they might not otherwise get to during their day to day work.
It was also an opportunity for colleagues to collaborate with other team members that they wouldn’t usually work directly with and to share their knowledge across disciplines. Android Developers mentored iOS Developers in Flutter, Xamarin Developers and Designers worked with ARKit to deliver 3D scratch cards and many more exciting and innovative products were worked on during this event.
Battling both January blues and a certain global pandemic has not been easy at times. A final key outcome was to boost morale and further grow our engineering community and increase comradeship.
Running this event remotely presented its own challenges which we worked together to overcome. Utilising tools such as Slack, Teams and even Discord (for a drop in/out style room) to promote collaboration and discussion of ideas. We had regular catchup sessions throughout the day to share progress or issues. These catch-ups and open communication channels all proved successful in encouraging involvement.
Overall this day significantly helped develop a strong sense of community, gave everyone the freedom to demonstrate their talents and creative sides and generated some innovative concepts that may inform our product offerings of the future.
Stuart Godfree, mkodo’s MD, commented, “Offering opportunities, to let our teams try new things, develop concepts and innovations our daily work would not normally offer is all part of what mkodo is and endeavours to encourage. My thanks go out to the team for their huge enthusiasm for this hackathon day and particularly Charlie for organising such a successful event, I suspect there will much recovery going on over the weekend as the teams come off their caffeine induced highs!"
