Engineering Blog

This December, Hackathon will be a little different:  instead of the normal 5 days, we’ll have from December 8th through holiday break.  With five days, a developer can build a decent proof of concept. But the gap between a proof of concept and something that can be released to production can be substantial; making it difficult for our ideas to be fully realized. Having around 12 working days on a project might mean that more of our code could be tested and ready to be placed into the product. We can come up with the right way to code, rather than the fastest way to get our ideas across. Our Hackathons could become more like Google’s ‘do a barrel roll’ or Google Labs, fun Easter eggs or helpful tools that impact the customer first hand.  The fact is, with so much time to work on our own projects at once, the company will benefit one way or another.

This Hackathon, Garston and I are continuing a project I started a couple weeks ago for the User Experience team. For the last month and a half I have been researching improvements to the infamous story splitting screen in Rally (#3 on Rally Ideas).  I have read comments and suggestions on improvements, met with agile coaches and technical account managers on how they recommend using the feature and what improvements they would make, conducted customer calls on the use of the feature, and created designs. My Hackathon idea is to build a lightweight app that I can use to validate with our users. If Garston and I make great progress, we may even have something fully tested and validated, and ready to replace the existing screen.
At the end of December or the beginning of January, our company will have its bi-weekly Engineering demo. My guess is that this demo will be one of the most attended of the year, because this demo will have an overview of what we have been working on for the last three weeks. People will be excited, because when you let creative people do what they want, they usually come up with some pretty bad-ass stuff. And maybe, just maybe, our own customers will get their “Christmas wish” from the work that Garston and I do this Hackathon.