Hack Day

“Dobby? What’s Hack Day?

Who Dobby is and what he has to do with hacking is only one of the many exciting results of the 24.01.2019.

For the second time the “Hack Day” took place at Setlog. The common computer scientist gathered not to do cyber terror – on the contrary: On this day there was again the chance to escape the daily routine and invited to work together innovatively, productively and creatively on different projects and topics.

Fresh views

Everyone is familiar with this blindness, which can sneak into everyday life – the more confident you are in a special topic and the longer you work on a project, the greater gets the probability that you overlook essential things. The principle of a Hack Day can help at exactly this point. On this day, the existing teams will be broken up and brought into new formations – who has to think of the Romans from Asterix and Obelix, too? – which allows new and fresh glances at “old” topics.

From the gooseberry formation we also went straight into the pizza piece formation at noon – despite the mushrooms hated by the general public, which found their way onto the dough

base, everyone was fed up. But back to the topic.

Team! Team! Team!

The topics are freely selectable, everyone could submit suggestions in advance – the main thing was tinkering, the main thing was working together and the main thing was buck. If these points are guaranteed, the productivity comes from completely alone and the results anyway.

Setlog, as a company, can only profit from this gathering of employees: Of course, the primary focus is on creative processes, but also on the optimization of internal processes. Using methods such as “Domain Driven Design”, new aspects for the OSCA software could be developed. By optimizing the internal Setlog Wiki, the internal exchange should also be accelerated and made more effective.

Even if the Hack Day is a “Wish you something” event, a few points have to be defined beforehand to serve as orientation:

– Document goals

– Sustainable work and recording of results

– Building on results

– Use of ideas collected in advance

Furthermore, the organization responded to the criticisms of the last Hack Day: A too large team prevented efficient work, this time these were smaller, a moderation ensured the adherence to schedules and thus facilitated the processes, and the mushrooms on the pizza… well, we already had that.

To pick up all the participants, the teams presented their results in the form of a small presentation: The precious, hard-earned knowledge should finally reach everyone, here too they were happy about the exchange and input.

All projects promised excitement, were informative and welded together – but one project conquered all hearts: We are happy about our new employee Dobby, an automat

ed slack bot, who is happy to answer all our questions – He tells us who has a birthday or who owns the windbag in the fridge.

+++SPOILER ALARM+++

Not only does Dobby look like the popular character from the Harry Potter movies, he’s at least as lovable – we’re confident that Setlog won’t have the same fate as the movies. In this sense: we are looking forward to the next Hack Day on 21.02.2019!