It's not all about engineering! That's quite a statement from a software engineer, but I do believe that's a true fact\nin our life as professionals: sometimes you really need time to hack things together. We just had our fourth Hackathon\nover the last weekend and though I could not contribute to it actively with a project of mine it was a tremendous amount\nof fun!
\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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