Following on our monthly “push” challenges where we challenge our team to change their habits to become more healthy or to handle stress more effectively. Our push challenge this month is focused on productivity and how we can be more productive as both individuals and as a team.
The Synthesis team met up after hours at our offices in Melrose Arch to participate in another mini productivity hackathon. Following on the previous hackathon, our team was split into 4 teams who were tasked at finding the best coder in the company. The teams were ETL (Extract Transform Load), Database, API and front end. This hackathon was far more collaborative than the previous hackathon and teams had to work together in order to reach the common objective to find the best coder.
After a discussing which code quality metrics to use, the various teams, fueled by beer and pizza, set out on their quests. The database team went through a quick iteration of Cassandra, MongoDB and finally settled on using MS SQL to store the data that it got from the ETL team. The API team decided to use the .NET stack to connect to the database and used Nancy to expose a RESTful API that the front end team could use to query the database. The front end team used a combination of Bootstrap and AngularJS with some external JavaScript libraries that created some fireworks when the winners were announced. The front end contained photos of the winner and the 2 runner ups.
This was another fun team building even and we look forward to our big 12 hour hackathon taking place during May.
