Engineering Hack Week (Part 1)

A long established tradition within Engineering here at SugarCRM is something that we call "Hack Week".  A couple times a year we fly our engineers from all over the world to our headquarters in Cupertino, CA for a week of fun, creativity, and some serious hacking.  On the week of July 27th 2015, it happened again!

https://twitter.com/jenny_gonsalves/status/625758911409172481

Hack Format

The format for these events vary but by far everyone's favorite is more of a freestyle event.  Prior to this event, we create a JIRA project for everyone to start entering their project ideas.  Project ideas varied widely - better Sugar development tooling, improving our test infrastructure, small Sugar product improvements, or grand new ideas and research projects.  Then on Monday these Sugar-related project ideas as well as last minute ones are written on the whiteboard in the Engineering huddle.

Remember Sweet Spot?  This started as a hack week project from early this year.

Engineers get to decide what they want to work on, so volunteers stand up in front of the whiteboard and pitch their ideas to the group until everybody has had their say.  Then we get to work!

https://twitter.com/jenny_gonsalves/status/625761174684958720

Guest Attendees

With so many people from Engineering in one place, this becomes a great opportunity to bring in guests from Sugar Developer community in order to network with the team, learn a whole lot, and get answers to their Sugar 7 questions from the talent that built it and maintain it.

So in the spirit of increased collaboration, we decided to invite a handful of developers from our US based partners to participate.

We had guest developers from Levementum, Faye BSGArcsona participate in this hack week.

Team Building

On Monday evening, we held a team building event in downtown Palo Alto which was a blast!  Our guests were also invited for those brave enough to participate!

We partnered with The Go Game to put on a VERY entertaining movie making competition.  Teams were randomly assigned and given a duffel bag full of props that matched one of several common film genres.  We were given 2 hours to create short films based on these themes that ranged from romance (Oooh la la!) to science fiction.

https://twitter.com/jenny_gonsalves/status/626086820116238337

We then got to enjoy a private screening of each of our films during dinner that evening at Pampas.

By the end of the night, every film qualified as award winning.  But none of us will be quitting our day jobs.

https://twitter.com/jenny_gonsalves/status/626087975428816896

In a follow up post, we will discuss more about the 16(!!) different projects Sugas and guests worked on and give you a peek at the project demos that were presented on Thursday, July 30th.