Hack on

This week, i participated in my first Hackathon at the company. What an incredibly humbling, inspiring, exhausting yet energizing and fulfilling experience it has been. Our team, with help from our project lead Manoj, partnered with Dost Education, whose vision is to get every child in India school ready. Yes - you read that right, get every child - regardless of the parents' literacy level - school ready. Dost leadership, Sneha and Sindhuja, have done an incredible job of reaching 35,000 families already in a last few years. They are now at an inflection point, setting up to scale with a lofty goal of reaching 500,000 families by 2020. While our hackathon team did build a few tools during this week to help them on the journey, the bigger win has been that we are walking away with a shared sense of ongoing partnership to empower this organization.

Personally, i am taking away

1. Strong partnerships and a deeper appreciation for all the Engineering team members of our team - having worked closely with them over the last 72 hours, i now am reminded of my own days as a developer. It was amazing to see when we had trust in the team, a shared vision within the team and with our partners and a clear scope, it was very frictionless to achieve the results. Clearly, challenges arise once this model has to be done at scale in a big matrixed organization but it always boils down to the fundamentals.
2. A renewed sense of curiosity - Over the past 3 days, i learned more about GitHub, Azure Storage, Dynamics 365 and a bunch of other technologies and how it relates to Store, than i ever could in a classroom training. Listening to a diverse set of peers talk about different technologies, in a low-key working lunch environment, can some (most) times be a very conducive learning setting.
3. A feeling of gratitude - Working in a team where the leadership not just 'allows' you, but encourages you to take 3 days from your day-to-day work to step outside of your comfort zone to participate in a project that you are passionate about, fills me with gratitude. It also inculcates a sense of responsibility in me, to pay that forward to my team and my peers. Of course, there is a ton of business value that the company is able to harness through events like this but i would prefer that business value is harnessed through such hackathons and inclusion efforts than other means.

Thanks Girish, Mudit, Grishma, Deepika, Roycey and Manoj. Looking forward to continuing the partnership with the team.