A little more than 26 hours after it had started, the votes were tallied and the winners announced. The prizes for the winners ranged from Bose headphones to dinner at a local restaurant to stock options. Steve took home our top prize for his work on internal customer reporting, which received lots of cheers, the loudest of which came from our solution architects. But before I get ahead of myself, let me go back to the beginning.
I’m a big believer in company sponsored hackathons. They provide a much needed break from the daily grind of building a product, and can be a cathartic release for pent up creative energies. Every company has different goals in their hackathons. Mine were simple: 1) promote innovations in areas at least loosely related to the challenges of CloudHealth (e.g. cloud computing, distributed systems, analytics, big data, ITSM), and 2) have fun.
Our hackathon started at 5 PM on Tuesday with the informal agreement you could think about a hackathon idea prior to start, but could not do any actual work. There is some disagreement of whether Vikram and Efe were caught working on their idea Tuesday afternoon - but the evidence against them was very inconclusive, so we let them compete anyway. ;)
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