For the second time this year, members of the AUTO1 Group Tech department came together to code, develop exciting projects and have fun! Disclaimer: in an AUTO1 Group hackathon, the focus is not on delivering as many projects as possible - on the contrary, it is about the fun of developing and having joint team sessions in a creative and relaxed setting.
\nMany thanks to our video crew who did a great job at capturing the atmosphere and collecting impressions, just take a look:
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\nThe overall theme of the autumn hackathon was SHEEP IT, a pun which should need no explanation. A total of 15 teams competed, with around 40 participants in our Berlin HQ. In addition, there were also colleagues from Kiev, Milan and Katowice that joined remotely.
\nThe winning team, codename “Bike Thieves”, won by developing an anti-theft Slack bot, which ensures that no bicycles can be stolen in the parking space of our Bergmannstraße HQ. When using this Slack bot, you can protect yourself against bicycle theft as you will be informed by the bot and can quickly check and see what’s going on if your bicycle is moved.
\nAs most great ideas, one of our colleagues came up with this during a rather emotionally charged moment for a Berliner - his own bike was stolen during work hours.
\nThere is still a lot that needs to be done before this bot can be used in everyday life. Even under the time constraints of the hackathon, team members Sergey, Rafael and Dmitri made substantial progress on their Smartlock. The team was able to convince the other participants of their idea and their problem-solving strategy, which won them the first place. Some bike owners are already looking forward to using the bot.
\nSlack bots were a very popular topic at our autumn hackathon, with two other teams doing a language bot and a book exchange bot, while other projects included various internal quality-of-life upgrades to existing workflows, a browser based car game that was rigged to be unbeatable and a somewhat crazy face&object recognition software that was able to tell us, via Slack of course, how many free spots were in a kitchen and how many fruits were there.
\nIn addition to fame and glory, the winners received smart home starter kits, and all participants received a beautifully crafted sheep as a reminder of the hackathon.
\nWhat’s next?
\nThe next AUTO1 Group Hackathon will take place in spring 2020 and we look forward to even more exciting projects! Watch this space for updates, wink wink.
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\nUnfortunately, the BBQ we were hoping to have got cancelled due to bad weather conditions - thunderstorms showering\nBerlin repeatedly during the two days and the first night of the event. We had a fallback plan of course, so we simply\nresorted to it, with a massive pizza delivery ordered for dinner. If I were superstitious, I would likely expect at\nleast some bad luck from a date like Friday 13th...
\nThe start of the event is marked by a very informal pitch of project ideas from all the teams, that happened in one of\nour lovely kitchens in our Berlin Headquarters. I cannot make it to the meeting, but thanks to Lukas this moment is\ndocumented in pictures I can enjoy later during the day.
\nAfter the presentation the vibe of the Hackathon starts to percolate through the whole department, with groups of people\ndiscussing the nitty-gritty details of their plans: people start grouping around whiteboards, chatting in a kitchen over\na coffee or a cup of tea. Countless hours of hacking follow, seldom interrupted by breaks and further cross-team chats,\nuntil those three delivery guys make it to Engineering, carrying three huge piles of hot pizzas. Most participants leave\nbefore eleven, just a couple of hours - and of course a few drinks - after dinner.
\nDay two doesn't start with the best premises either: one of the entrance doors got broken, forcing everybody to find\ntheir way in through a secondary door most people were unaware of until this very moment. When they finally make it,\nthey find a nice breakfast provisioned by this guy, earlier in the morning: bread, butter, berries jam, mortadella,\nprosciutto and salami... that's what you get when you send the Italian guy out for the groceries...
\nBack to work, one more day of hacking. Hours fly by and in the afternoon everybody starts to look tired, with people\nleaving a few at a time when they either reach their goals or simply drop the towel. The last man standing leaves the\noffice at 9 pm, when I finally lock the door behind me and leave as well. We won't meet at the office on Sunday, though\nfurther remote work is allowed, for the overly-committed.
\nThe weekend is over, we are back to work. As the day is getting closer to its end, I see a few colleagues around the\noffice working on their projects presentations - the election of the winning teams is about to happen. We gather again\nin a meeting-room and groups take turns at the beamer, showing everybody else the best of their hacks. We all enjoy\nseeing our colleagues presenting implementations ranging from innovative to crazy and from business-focused to\nfun-making: cloud-based real-time analytics of business events, The-Matrix-style error logs visualization,\n\"The Mini Kevin 500\" - ok, this one would take some time to explain, in a nutshell, it's a hardware monitoring tool\nnamed after our CTO - and, to our greatest delight, somebody built a 3d printer for our office!
\nWe do our usual voting by popular acclaim and the winners finally get some brand new Nerf guns, the well-deserved prize\nfor their efforts!
\nSo once again, it’s not all about engineering, but also making crazy ideas become real and most importantly have fun\ntogether. And that’s why AUTO1 is such a great place to work!
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