Kindling a culture of innovation and collaboration through quarterly company hackathons
When you hear the word "hackathon", most folks imagine a bunch of engineers feverishly typing on a keyboard in the wee hours of the morning, eating pizza and creating something new. But if that’s what you think a GoSpotCheck Hackathon looks like, well... you’d pretty much be right on!
This year, GoSpotCheck started hosting quarterly hackathons (which we playfully refer to as “Hackattacks”). Each Hackattack is an opportunity for engineers and non-engineers alike to team up, identify a product challenge they are interested in solving, and spend the next two days creating a solution to that problem.
At the end of the two days, the entire organization comes together to watch the teams present a demo of their “hack” and to vote on the one that they feel has the most potential. Finally, awards are handed out for top-scoring teams by the week’s end (previous Grand Prize winners received a very snazzy, very Top-Gun inspired, Hackattack Denim Jacket)
This year’s Grand Prize hack went to the HigherFi team, who demoed an upgraded image recognition capture mode which included a new and intuitive way to identify and correct unrecognizable image tags. Special shoutout to Jeff Johnson, Goran Rauker, Adam Socik and Trevor Nelson for their big win!
But no matter who “wins” the Hackattack, each and every hack is a celebration of the talent, creativity and resourcefulness of the amazing folks we have on our engineering teams. And while there are too many great ideas to implement each one, there is always the chance that some of the team’s handiwork will be formally adopted and released into the product for our customers to experience.
Here’s a look behind the scenes at our November 2019 Hackattack:
