TeleTracking- Spring Hackathon!

Spring is here and so is the next wave of innovative ideas from Teletracking Technologies! 15 teams with representatives from software engineering, product, solutions center and others participated in the Spring Hackathon (TeleHacking). The teams had 2 days to creatively build new product ideas, tool enhancements or discover ways to improve our existing software products and delivery methodologies. On March 29th, final presentations were demoed to numerous TeleTracking leaders including the President, VP of Engineering, and VP of Information Technology and Technical Support.

The main organizer of the event, Sagar Cheekati, said “The ultimate goal is to eventually have this Hackathon go beyond just the Engineering and IT teams. We want employees from across the company to participate and share their innovative ideas.” TeleTracking is considering opening this event up to local college students as well.

The spring TeleHacking differed from the prior ones as several judges were from non-engineering or IT departments including leaders from the Professional Services and the Operations team. This provided a unique perspective on the feasibility and implementation of the ideas as well as foster more ongoing discussions between different groups. One of the new judges, Brian Vogel, VP of Information Technology and Technical Support, shared his thoughts afterwards, "This was my first Hackathon and I was really impressed with what the teams delivered in just 2 short days. It was a good mix of leveraging our existing technologies and some more futuristic stuff that provided a glimpse ahead. I was grateful to be included and look forward to the next one."

The overall winner was Team Command Line Zeroes. They created a command-line utility to help their fellow engineers automate development processes with the end goal of increased speed and efficiency in mind. They designed the tool using a plugin architecture to easily allow other teams to contribute more domain specific functionality and help with their specific workflows. Two plugins were created as well. One plugin allows for the creation of Git repos with all TeleTracking specific configuration in place. The other plugin leverages Terraform Plans to pre-calculate the additional cost generated by the proposed change to the cloud infrastructure. This allows engineers easier access to the cost their actions may impose. Technologies used were python, bash, Terraform, AWS and Homebrew.

Ken Poling, a member of Team Command Line Zeroes, enjoyed the event stating, “TeleHacking 2019 was truly a challenging and exciting experience. We are proud of what we have built and even more proud that other engineers were using the tool before the presentations were even over!"

The next Hackathon event will occur in late 2019!