Keep on Innovating: Kenzan’s Hackathon Highlights
As a digital consulting and software engineering firm that works with companies to accelerate digital transformation, we believe that instilling a culture of innovation within an enterprise organization is key to that.
At Kenzan, we work to do the same within our own organization by providing opportunities for our teams — across all roles and functions — to be creative, experiment with new tools and technologies, and give life to their ideas.
Earlier this February, Kenzan hosted our 2nd annual hackathon, a full-day event where teams of Kenzanites put their heads together to come up with some truly awesome projects. Here’s a round-up:
Team Moscow Mule
Project: Token-funded cloud environments
Looking to solve the problem around costs associated with experimenting in the cloud, this team put together a proof of concept that would mitigate expenses and wasteful resources. They came up with an idea to give developers tokens, similar to bitcoins, which can be used to provision isolated AWS environments. These tokens are associated with a number of units, which gets decremented every hour the environments created with it gets used. When the value in the token gets to zero, the environment gets decommissioned.
Following the hackathon, this project will continue to be developed through Kenzan’s protype program.
Team Kenzan Punchers
Project: Wellness app that integrates with Strava
One way that Kenzanites have always connected is through activities like hiking, biking, and running. To create an even deeper sense of community across all of our offices, this team set out to create an app that tracks employee fitness activities using Strava and displays the data via a dashboard. Employees can sign up to have their activities tracked, share with others, compete for glory, and view company-wide stats.
Employees first authenticate with Strava and authorize the Kenzan app to collect their activity data, which would be loaded into a cloud database periodically and provide access to it via an API. The dashboard UI would present a leaderboard of top athlete for the various activities.
Team Site Medics
Project: Re-create a website as a progressive web app
In order to replace the conventional Wordpress CMS with a modern static site generator, this team chose Gatsby, a React-based static progressive web app (PWA) generator. However, one drawback of a static site generators is that they are oriented toward developers, making it difficult for non-technical users to edit content without learning tools like Git. To solve this, Site Medics decided to couple Gatsby with Netlify CMS, an open source project that provides a user-friendly authoring interface for statically generated sites.
To give a small but compelling taste of this approach, the team recreated the home page of the site and swapped out the old Wordpress-rendered blog posts with Netlify CMS and Gatsby powered content. With just this small slice of the website, the benefits were readily apparent: super fast load times, minimal development effort, and a simple authoring experience for non-technical users.
Team Go Go Curry
Project: Visual regression testing
Team Go Go Curry worked on two different approaches to visual regression testing, first using a chrome extension called Lookalike, followed by test scripts using Puppeteer, Differencify, and Pixelmatch. The team ran all tools against a React-app and learned the ways to implement snapshot diffing as quickly as possible.
The project can be leveraged for future client work to quickly compare pre-post deployments to highlight intentional and unintentional changes at a glance.
HaTeam Hold For Applause
Project: Create a program that calculates the percentage of applause during the State of the Unions
The project included audio transcription services, language analysis, data analysis and a bit about TensorFlow, an open source machine learning framework. In the end, the project calculated that the average State of the Union address is 25–30% applause, with the most recent speech containing 27 minutes of just applause in an 82 minute speech.
Team Eulerian Steel
Project: GraphQL POC
Eulerian Steel wanted to determine if GraphQL was a good fit for Kenzan’s microservices stack. After evaluating the tool for its advantages and concerns, the team created a working demo — a Node.js GraphQL server, a simple schema to aggregate third party APIs and functions to resolve custom queries.
Team Update Your Tech Radar!
Project: Build a CLI application for Kenzan’s Tech Radar
The goal of this team’s project was to build a Golang CLI interface as well as provide team members an opportunity to experience with Golang. The teams wrote some small features for the tech radar, including parsing JSON, making http calls, and printing.
Team Tequila Mockingbird
Project: Build an automated beverage pouring device
Meet K.E.V.I.N. (Kindly Enabling Very Intoxicated Nerds), a drink dispensing robot built by team Tequila Mockingbird using Vue.js, Connection, Flask API, RPI GPIO, along with a bunch of pumps, hoses, relays and a switchboard to deliver beverages via a touchscreen interface. In one day Kevin went from a robot shell to dispensing a specified amount of a desired beverage with the touch for a button.
Team MexiKen
Project: Tech Radar skillset
The team from our Guadalajara office worked on a project to extend the use of Kenzan’s tech radar to manager the careers of Kenzanites by grouping skill sets relevant to a given position. By doing so, they hope to help their colleagues understand the skills they need to move ahead in their careers, and help managers identify projects that are best suited for their teams.
