Post

We recently held another Savient Hackathon at our offices in the centre of Cheltenham where many of our employees joined us for two days of problem solving, and pizza.

Lots of project ideas were submitted ahead of time, with a vote to narrow these down, and the kick-off meeting saw people volunteer for the shortlisted projects. There was no theme this time and the only rule was that you had to be on a team with at least one other person - this is about team work as well as tech!

The teams had until 3pm on day two to make progress on their projects and it was great to see the teams huddling together in the office as well as joining meetings with those participating remotely.

As some of the projects were directly relevant to the commercial running of Savient then the businesspeople were on hand to offer opinions and perspectives on the most valuable aspects of the projects.

Projects

The two days flew by and by the time the showcase came round we were able to demonstrate the following projects:

James Webb Telescope STEM Resource

Using the James Webb Telescope API to populate a web page to learn and explore data and images captured as part of this mission and allow them to be used in an educational STEM context.

DevOps Done Right

Exploring the different approaches to DevOps and the tools used to accomplish it.

Web Components

Web components are non-framework, custom HTML elements that could be used to build up a library of assets for a company that could outlive individual UI frameworks - so we explored if the reality matched the promise of the documentation!

Skills Cards

Matching people to projects is always tricky and the idea of a nice visual representation of skills - like baseball cards - was the concept for this project. Skills pickers, searching with smart complete and a nice clean UI design were accomplished before the showcase for this project.

People Project Planner

We have all used Jira, Gantt charts and other tools to plan work and tasks but these have shortcomings when trying to plan multiple projects and people.

The team on this project took a slightly different approach combining the visuals of Gantt chats with a more flexible approach that allows us to view people against projects, projects against people and perform some what-if type questions to match people and project needs together. This was quite an ambitious project, and the team showcased a rudimentary working solution which I am sure our commercial team will be looking to take forward after the Hackathon.

Conclusion

All of the projects had working demos at the showcase and the effort put into all of them was clear to see. Each of the projects could have a real impact for the work and outreach activities we do here at Savient - a great testament for the entire team we have here!