When life gives you ideas...hack away!

They say, when life gives you lemons - make lemonade! Makers get lemons, but they also get a lot of ideas! Being a maker at Microsoft especially is a wonderful opportunity for all of us who are passionate about using technology to help people and help the planet. We get to work on ideas outside of our routine work and make them real via an incredible platform called Hackathon!

As the buzz of our annual Hackathon starts again, I can't help but reflect on the amazing experience of Hackathon 2020.

May 2022: We were about 4 months into the COVID-19 induced lockdown and the organization had begun to rapidly move many of the marquee events to completely digital, including Hackathon 2020!

We were all still coming to terms with this way of working...what started as a couple of WFH days became weeks and months. Work continued, but play subsided. Organizations began to realize the impact of serendipitous connections, hallway chats, physical proximity on employee productivity and well being. The life of social camaraderie that we took for granted now became an impossible dream! It was on one such frustratingly hot May afternoon, that the maker in me started toying around with a bunch of What-Ifs and a seed of an idea was born!

At that moment, Kaynaat pinged with the "Hackathon coming soon!" email and on an impulse, I uploaded my idea to our hackathon site! Little did I know what I had set in motion! Folks started liking my idea, upvoting, reaching out - and before I realized - I had this amazing team of Microsofties signed up to be my co-hackers, rallying around that seed of thought planted on that hot May afternoon!

July 2020, Sunday evening 7PM: The twilight zone just before the hackathon Monday, when I was suddenly hit by the realization that tomorrow morning, a team of super talented hackers are going to be waiting to for me to show up - and I have no idea what to do! Sweaty palms, adrenalin kick, and over the next two hours, I have an ambitious, maybe outrageous plan that I am going to set in motion the next morning!

The Hackathon: Over the next 3 days, the hack evolves, people step in to assume responsibilities, Amit becomes my partner in crime, custodian of our sanity as as we evolve the concept. Everyone pools in on the storyline, and the concept begins to firm up. The talented Ms Pranava Tandra starts whipping out awesome Figma mockups and storyboards. Someone pitches in to assume ownership of concept videos, someone starts starts detailing features, and someone else starts breaking down the nuances for accessibility. Mornings and afternoons and evenings we meet, batons are passed from one sub-team to another as the sun moves through the continents, and finally from that blood and sweat and toil, emerges our phoenix of hope, creativity and resilience - virus or no virus, mankind will survive and thrive and care for each other and find ways to be there for each other!

The process of turning an idea to a vision that we could share with the rest of the organization was an end in itself, and it was further sweetened as we went on to win a place in the Executive Sponsored hack category of Microsoft on Microsoft- a huge achievement with a lot of firsts - A first fully digital event, a first global hack team and most of all people wanting to do more even though each one was going through a personal struggle with the pandemic in some form or the other! Hats off team, and while we may or may not hack together this year, looking forward to all the magic that is waiting to unravel once again this October!