Building products for engineers, by engineers.

We just wrapped our 2019 Hackathon—an annual competition and celebration of tech and its ability to solve challenges we face across the bank.

For this year's event, we took a different approach—we stripped away as many of the rules and guidelines as we could and instead put to our teams one thing: get technical. 

We asked them to build anything they wanted as long as it was solving a problem they faced when they came to work and crucially, it should be something they would want to use themselves as engineers. The winning product—called AGORA—is a global marketplace for reusing code and other technical solutions inside the bank. When the build is complete later this year, the product will be integrated with GitHub and leverage other important tools like code analysis and quality ranking. 

The concept behind AGORA is not only solving a point of major frustration for our developers and engineers but we know that it's also a tool being built by our own engineers to make their lives at work easier. And this for me is one of the most important things we can do as tech leaders—clear the path to bring in the best solutions not just for your clients...but to also give your technical teams the best tools to enable them serve to the Firm in the best possible way.

We have a lot more to do as we keep improving our developer experience, but the enthusiasm and quality of solution that our Hackathon winners brought this year just shows we are moving in the right direction.

Congrats to team AGORA!