Hackathons

As promised all the way back in my NDC Wrap-up , I wanted to share my findings using Azure Functions on a recent project. As always, the story begins with a user requirement. The use case was to build a news monitor which would check a given list of sites and email through any new stories over the last day. My immediate thoughts turned to Azure Functions as a solution. Amongst other reasons, they are quick to spin up/code, would cost little-to-nothing to run and have built in support for timers, file monitors etc… ...

We’ve all heard the term Hackathon and some of us have likely been to one. They are the stuff of legend – 48 hour coding sessions fuelled by pizza and energy drinks. Events which have spawned long lists of multi-million dollar success stories such as Carousell and GroupME . But what are they, and how do you get your manager to agree to running one? Let’s think about Jeff Jeff? Let me introduce you to Jeff. Jeff has been working at BigCorp now for several years. He’s a talented mid-level engineer working on a long running piece of enterprise software. You know the kind of software we’re talking about here. The kind of software that was designed by a plethora of contractors who have long since left. The kind of software that started life as a Winforms app, spun out as a Service, switched to MVVM, implemented several different UX frameworks and now resembles Sloth from The Goonies. As you can imagine, Jeff is fairly dissatisfied at work. If you were to ask him why, well he’d have a list longer than his arm. The tech is archaic – all his friends are playing with the latest .js library and he’s merely keeping the life support running. This means he is not getting opportunity to learn, develop and challenge himself. He also works alone and feels abandoned on this project. This has led to him no longer believing in the mission of the team or the values of BigCorp. ...