Hackathon – WellSky Engineering’s most eagerly anticipated bi-annual event where ideas come to life in the form of prototypes! An event that allows engineers to freely experiment with innovative concepts and showcase them across the organization. Even though the word “hackathon” literally means “marathon for hackers”, its real meaning reaches far beyond. It fosters culture, technological advancement, team building, and time-management skills - just to name a few. Gaining in popularity over the years, the Hackathon has been an integral part of WellSky culture since 2019.
Ever since the pandemic hit, there has been a major shift in the way we work. Remote work is now the new norm. While embracing this change, we lost the benefits of face-to-face communication and those casual chats on coffee breaks. Teams are now distributed across the globe and working in different time zones - leaving little room for interactions outside our assigned tasks. The WellSky Hackathon promises to change that - providing an excellent opportunity for a short, quality break from everyday work to interact, refuel, and recharge.
The beauty of our teams lies in the diversity; our colleagues have a wide array of expertise, interests, and backgrounds. Hackathon offers a platform where fresh and modern ideas can embrace experienced minds to create meaningful Proofs of Concept (PoCs) that could be used in various WellSky products. These PoCs come in various forms that include modernization, leveraging the power of automation, improved performance, pattern recognition and the use of AI.
All that in a day and a half? One certainly needs a great deal of skill and focus to fit their ideas and thoughts into a functioning unit in such a short timespan and to present them effectively. The Hackathon is more than just an event - it’s an experience that enables us to collaborate, share knowledge, learn task delegation, understand various perspectives, and finalize approaches. Nevertheless, Hackathon has its fun side, too! Working together on a Hackathon project this past Friday brought our team many moments of laughter when something did not work as expected on the first go. Through Hackathon, we have had the chance to come closer as a team in a more casual and refreshing way.
The final segment of Hackathon is equally energetic with teams presenting their groundbreaking concepts in less than 5 minutes. Some projects stand out and make it to the top. Regardless, every PoC encompasses potential for improvement and modernization.
This year’s Hackathon is now over, but its takeaways will last far longer. We look ahead to implementing ideas presented to real world projects in our business and our work. This will bring true meaning to an event at the core of our culture here at WellSky.
