Where are the developers so harsh that in a hackathon a 100 kg project wins?
Recently, the first hackathon for JetBrains took place in our St. Petersburg and Munich offices. Dozens of teams within the company put off the usual work in order to concentrate on creating their own product for 48 hours. This non-stop coding format has gained popularity for a long time, but in JetBrains, hackathons were not performed before. The first experience turned out to be successful, and we decided to share it: suddenly, in other companies, hackathons will help the guys change the context and implement old ideas.
In our battle of minds could take part as employees of the company, as well as their friends and acquaintances programmers. The idea was received with a bang, and a group of colleagues enthusiastically began to discuss the ideas of the projects and the various ways of their implementation. We organized a page on the intranet, on which it was possible to offer projects and join other people's ideas. For several days, the usual workflows slowed down, the participants switched to their non-trivial projects.
Competition is always a challenge, so the main motivation was not valuable prizes, but the desire to be first. Winning the hackathon is an opportunity to realize an interesting and risky idea, earn your bit of honor and respect, work intensively with colleagues from other teams. However, the prizes were also foreseen: the prize fund was $ 10,000.
')
By the way, it should be said about how the winners were chosen. After 48 hours, the programmers went to sleep at home, and the next day they gathered in the office to present their work to their colleagues. More than 150 colleagues came to see the presentations of the participants. Then, among all the employees of the company, a vote was opened for the best project - each voter could distribute three votes among the projects he liked.
In total, more than 70 people took part in the hackathon, on average, 3-4 people per team, but there were also daredevils who coded completely alone. Code streams rushed to github immediately after opening the repository for developers. Interestingly, several groups consisted of employees from different food teams. This gave colleagues a unique opportunity to work together in a new composition, which rarely happens in everyday life. The situation was also new - in the premises of the new St. Petersburg office. Some employees came to St. Petersburg specifically for this.
We tried our best to support the concentration and morale of the participants. During the specially cooked hot breakfasts, lunches and dinners, hackatons could discuss the latest successes and unexpected problems. Not without the Red Bull booth, which opened at the most necessary moment (they say that this is the sign of the correct hackathon). In addition, we invited a professional massage therapist so that the participants could relax and relax a bit during the massage.
As a result, 22 projects were presented to the public. And so it is understandable with what impatience the hakaton participants were waiting for the announcement of the results. Maxim Shafirov, CEO of JetBrains, at the awards ceremony, thanked everyone who accepted this challenge and told the participants: “I am very impressed with how it all went and what you have achieved. Next time I will definitely participate myself. I feel that this is one of the coolest things that happened in the company this year, and a lot of positive things happened to us. It will be hard to get the same emotional charge next time, because surprising yourself is rather difficult every time. But I hope we all try together. ”
Now about the most interesting - about the winners. Third place was divided between two projects. The author of the first project, Feature Suggester, was Alexander Podkhalyuzin . His idea was born out of observation: even the experienced developers of IntelliJ IDEA do not use all the features of IntelliJ IDEA themselves. Often, out of habit, a person manually performs an operation that has long been automated and assigned to a hot key in IntelliJ IDEA. Alexander made a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA, which tracks some typical actions and suggests how they can be done much faster. This plugin is a great help for beginners working with IDE, for university professors, and for students. The hint base is expanding, and therefore even experienced developers can find new ways to speed up coding with the help of a plug-in, or they can offer their own extension.
The plugin is available in the plugin repository for IntelliJ IDEA 12.1.3 or IntelliJ IDEA 13 EAP. Search for " IDEA Feature Suggester ".
Another finalist, who also took the third place , Vasily Kudryashov with the project Sovietoons for fans of Soviet animation. This is a website whose main idea is the criterion for the similarity of cartoons by the coincidence of the working groups that created these cartoons. On this site you can find a cartoon, on which well-known directors and artists worked, but for some reason it was not widely shown on TV and therefore it may turn out to be an unexpected discovery. The project contains a base of multiple multipliers, for each of which is a complete list of his works. The site presents studios with all created cartoons and for the sake of experiment - a list of various animation techniques.
Participants of the Book'n'Meet project, who took the second place ( Anna Oreshnikova, Antonina Vesna, Stanislav Kurilov, Andrey Krotov and Alexey Kireev ), noticed that there are many meeting rooms in the offices of JetBrains company, there are regular stand-ups of food teams every day , numerous newsgroups, in which people from different offices participate. In order to avoid chaos and battles for negotiations, a rationalization decision was made: the project Book'n'Meet. This is a program for tablets that hang next to each meeting room in the office and are kind of information boards. The screen displays the current status of the conversation (busy / free), the time remaining until the end of the free or busy period, information about the current meeting and the schedule for the current day. If the negotiation is free, then you can immediately take it, if not - you can find the nearest free ones and borrow one of them. You can also book any free period for the current day.
I was really shocked by the winning project , which really got out of a number of competing projects with its look and sound - literally.
A team of eight people ( Dmitry Ivanov, Sergey Baltiysky, Leonid Stryuk, Artyom Bukhonov, Nikita Raba, Sergey Kuks, Ivan Serdyuk, Denis Korneev ) made the original musical instrument Ideaphone based on orchestra bells made from gas pipes, controlled by an automated system based on Arduino . A web server and a management client are attached to the instrument (a web application with black and white keys familiar to the musician).
The winners carefully compiled the technical requirements:
In addition to the pleasure of the process, the delight of colleagues and the deserved first prize, the winners are proud of the fact that the large design will not only occupy three square meters in the office, but will also convene the melodious sounds of those who routinely forget about daily meetings: the sound is loud, you will not dissuade that I heard a convocation on a stand-up.
The winner of the hackathon was awarded a cup. It will be rolling, and the engraving of the winners of each hackathon is performed on it.
The euphoria of what is happening in the company continues, the next hackathon will surely happen, as all the staff members unanimously supported the idea. And now you need to work to please users with old and new products :)
In our battle of minds could take part as employees of the company, as well as their friends and acquaintances programmers. The idea was received with a bang, and a group of colleagues enthusiastically began to discuss the ideas of the projects and the various ways of their implementation. We organized a page on the intranet, on which it was possible to offer projects and join other people's ideas. For several days, the usual workflows slowed down, the participants switched to their non-trivial projects.
Competition is always a challenge, so the main motivation was not valuable prizes, but the desire to be first. Winning the hackathon is an opportunity to realize an interesting and risky idea, earn your bit of honor and respect, work intensively with colleagues from other teams. However, the prizes were also foreseen: the prize fund was $ 10,000.
')
By the way, it should be said about how the winners were chosen. After 48 hours, the programmers went to sleep at home, and the next day they gathered in the office to present their work to their colleagues. More than 150 colleagues came to see the presentations of the participants. Then, among all the employees of the company, a vote was opened for the best project - each voter could distribute three votes among the projects he liked.
In total, more than 70 people took part in the hackathon, on average, 3-4 people per team, but there were also daredevils who coded completely alone. Code streams rushed to github immediately after opening the repository for developers. Interestingly, several groups consisted of employees from different food teams. This gave colleagues a unique opportunity to work together in a new composition, which rarely happens in everyday life. The situation was also new - in the premises of the new St. Petersburg office. Some employees came to St. Petersburg specifically for this.
We tried our best to support the concentration and morale of the participants. During the specially cooked hot breakfasts, lunches and dinners, hackatons could discuss the latest successes and unexpected problems. Not without the Red Bull booth, which opened at the most necessary moment (they say that this is the sign of the correct hackathon). In addition, we invited a professional massage therapist so that the participants could relax and relax a bit during the massage.
As a result, 22 projects were presented to the public. And so it is understandable with what impatience the hakaton participants were waiting for the announcement of the results. Maxim Shafirov, CEO of JetBrains, at the awards ceremony, thanked everyone who accepted this challenge and told the participants: “I am very impressed with how it all went and what you have achieved. Next time I will definitely participate myself. I feel that this is one of the coolest things that happened in the company this year, and a lot of positive things happened to us. It will be hard to get the same emotional charge next time, because surprising yourself is rather difficult every time. But I hope we all try together. ”
Now about the most interesting - about the winners. Third place was divided between two projects. The author of the first project, Feature Suggester, was Alexander Podkhalyuzin . His idea was born out of observation: even the experienced developers of IntelliJ IDEA do not use all the features of IntelliJ IDEA themselves. Often, out of habit, a person manually performs an operation that has long been automated and assigned to a hot key in IntelliJ IDEA. Alexander made a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA, which tracks some typical actions and suggests how they can be done much faster. This plugin is a great help for beginners working with IDE, for university professors, and for students. The hint base is expanding, and therefore even experienced developers can find new ways to speed up coding with the help of a plug-in, or they can offer their own extension.
The plugin is available in the plugin repository for IntelliJ IDEA 12.1.3 or IntelliJ IDEA 13 EAP. Search for " IDEA Feature Suggester ".
Another finalist, who also took the third place , Vasily Kudryashov with the project Sovietoons for fans of Soviet animation. This is a website whose main idea is the criterion for the similarity of cartoons by the coincidence of the working groups that created these cartoons. On this site you can find a cartoon, on which well-known directors and artists worked, but for some reason it was not widely shown on TV and therefore it may turn out to be an unexpected discovery. The project contains a base of multiple multipliers, for each of which is a complete list of his works. The site presents studios with all created cartoons and for the sake of experiment - a list of various animation techniques.
Participants of the Book'n'Meet project, who took the second place ( Anna Oreshnikova, Antonina Vesna, Stanislav Kurilov, Andrey Krotov and Alexey Kireev ), noticed that there are many meeting rooms in the offices of JetBrains company, there are regular stand-ups of food teams every day , numerous newsgroups, in which people from different offices participate. In order to avoid chaos and battles for negotiations, a rationalization decision was made: the project Book'n'Meet. This is a program for tablets that hang next to each meeting room in the office and are kind of information boards. The screen displays the current status of the conversation (busy / free), the time remaining until the end of the free or busy period, information about the current meeting and the schedule for the current day. If the negotiation is free, then you can immediately take it, if not - you can find the nearest free ones and borrow one of them. You can also book any free period for the current day.
I was really shocked by the winning project , which really got out of a number of competing projects with its look and sound - literally.
A team of eight people ( Dmitry Ivanov, Sergey Baltiysky, Leonid Stryuk, Artyom Bukhonov, Nikita Raba, Sergey Kuks, Ivan Serdyuk, Denis Korneev ) made the original musical instrument Ideaphone based on orchestra bells made from gas pipes, controlled by an automated system based on Arduino . A web server and a management client are attached to the instrument (a web application with black and white keys familiar to the musician).
The winners carefully compiled the technical requirements:
Functional
- The instrument must cover at least two octaves (24 semitones). The sound of individual notes should coincide with the notes of the first and second octaves of a uniformly tempered pitch.
- The volume should be sufficient so that the melody can be heard in all rooms of a single floor of the BC Universe (if the instrument is correctly positioned on the floor).
- At the same time, you can extract several sounds, which allows the texture of the music to be not monophonic, but polyphonic, harmonic or homophonic-harmonic.
- The composition should be able to play on timer
- Integration with TeamCity - if the build is broken, a signal is transmitted to the instrument - to lose the angry melody.
Non-functional
- Noble sound: when hitting the pipe there is a clear base tone and a tert-quint overtone. The rest of the noise should be as quiet as possible. Presumably achieved by the thin wall thickness of the tube
- the felt on the end of the striker can give a quieter sound
- Convenient editing of songs on the device - editor + user-friendly interface fills.
Video: presentation of the work of the ideaphone
In addition to the pleasure of the process, the delight of colleagues and the deserved first prize, the winners are proud of the fact that the large design will not only occupy three square meters in the office, but will also convene the melodious sounds of those who routinely forget about daily meetings: the sound is loud, you will not dissuade that I heard a convocation on a stand-up.
The winner of the hackathon was awarded a cup. It will be rolling, and the engraving of the winners of each hackathon is performed on it.
The euphoria of what is happening in the company continues, the next hackathon will surely happen, as all the staff members unanimously supported the idea. And now you need to work to please users with old and new products :)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/181672/
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