Hackathon at Engel - #1

We use parts of the SAFe Framework to organize our work and streamline our teams over the difficulties of different departures, countries and even companies that work together. In this framework one, imho important, part is the innovation and planning spring. It contains not only the PI Planning, which allows us to plan our work on a higher level, it contains the very important innovation part. Innovation is a core part of every company and sometimes you have to give it a dedicated time, so you don’t forget about it.

Starting small and getting bigger sounded good, so the idea of a classic internal hackathon was born.

The preparation

Preparing a hackathon is rather easy: Mix cool ideas (which were already in the brains of the people), get drinks, sweet and sour food, get interested people and set a date.

We chose Friday the 13th as a date. Devs from our teams in CZ, our Schwertberg teams and the colleagues from the software department - control answered the “call”.

We divided the task to organize food by three: one brought muffins, the other beer, chips and Soletti and the third Schnitzelsemmel organized from the canteen.

Regarding the cool ideas, some stuff popped up before:

• We have a coffee machine and still do the strike list on paper .. ON PAPER!!!11!!!! (and there is a serial interface to the coffee machine)
• We have the panel on our injection molding machines where we eventually could add some easter e…. cool new things that maybe some customer buys
• We have a cooperation with crate.db who provide us their time series database to experiment
• We have an edge device of our own which could be used, or a raspberry pi, or a card reader, or some things we could solder together, or…

Pitching the ideas

Friday the 13th 08:00 in the morning: Despite the fact that everyone is a bit tired we started a short introduction round to get everyone awake and at least heard everyone others name (and forgot it in the same second.. just speaking for myself (I am so sorry guys :/ )). After that, we took some time to pitch ideas and form groups. The outcome was….

1. Coffee machine: Let’s connect the coffee machine with a raspberry pi and try to get a coffee via a webapp or smartphone app.
2. The Retro gaming: Let’s pimp our CC300 with some retro game and use the touchscreen as well as the hardware buttons and the e-move
3. Gource: Use Gource to visualize our git repos and what’s going on there. Raspberry pi or edge device for running
4. Database Crate.db Let’s use the Crate.db for accessing our status reports (stareps)

Four topics - four teams that sounded reasonable. There was only one precondition for getting team members together: Don’t form a team with your usual team members ??

Hack hack hack

From 9:00 to 17:00 was hacking time. For that I just let the pictures speak…

Just to mention here: I was glad, that our Product Owners Verena and Patrik visited us as well as Christina (UI/UX) took a quick look at our projects. We will integrate them at the next Hackathon.

The results

In the morning I was not sure how far we would come, but oh boy, these projects where insane and everyone was going nuts the whole day, so every team could show prototypes of there projects. Let’s go through them:

Coffee Machine

The team consisted of Daniel, Jan, Helmut and Paul achieved the following:

• Connection of the Raspberry PI to the Coffee Machine (Spring Boot service)
• Steering of the machine buttons and display
• Building a web app to order the coffee
• Building a Flutter smartphone app to order the coffee
• Authentification through a RFID reader

Retro Game

The team consisted of Philipp, Andreas, Thomas and a bit myself (I most of the time looked at the C++ code an thought like: Oh my god I know this language, but can not program it ?? ) achieved the following:

• Getting Snake run on the CC300
• Using the e-move to control it
• Adding additional food for the snake to it via touchscreen

?Gource

The team consisted of Clemens, Sabine and Christoph. They achieved the following:

• Getting Gource running
• All our git repos are connected
• Periodical refresh of the visualization
• Preparation of the team board integration

Database Crate.dB

The team consisted of Jaroslav, Oliver, Benjamin and Simon + a helping hand directly from crate.io. They achieved the following:

• Crate.db is a distributed database system with SQL- queries
• Using the crate.db and loading > 2.3 billion Starep Entries into it
• Accesstime could be reduced from 5-10s before to incredible <0,5s
• Prototype of the Smartphone App for easy analyzing.

As a sum up of the day, we did some internal voting and the winner is….

Conclusio and Finish

We saw what happens if the greatest minds come together and do cool things. Behind these fun projects are real technologies and tools, testing them and evaluating them is not only cool, but also necessary. Despite the fact, that we found out how to communicate to a coffeemachine and do play snake on a CC300 we also found out, that we can use crate.db for our product and get a huge speed improve. We can use Gource to visualize and track ourselves how we use our repos and check how good we are in integrating our code into the master.

In my point of view the most value came out in the interaction between the teams. Some of them didn’t know each other before, although they worked in the same company. Internal company networking is as important as external one.

I am looking forward to our next Hackathon. Maybe we open it up for external people as well. Brace yourself...