Hack Week 2019

Another week is over, here in ThoughtWorks Barcelona but this time it was different from the others, it was full of new ideas and teams, at the end of it that was even a prize, a winner and a celebration. Are you wondering what’s going on, right?

TL;DR
One of our clients: AutoScout24 every year allows us to submit new ideas and work on it for the whole week, creating or joining new teams.

The Idea

Before starting the week, we had to submit an idea we wanted to work on or just propose, so we put in our team time a slot to talk about it.
We did a brainstorming in which came up with many beautiful ideas about our services, our work, tools and workflow.
Once voted and submitted we were ready to start and looked forward to stepping over the weekend for starting this adventure.
The idea that came up was about the necessity to connect people, their skills and services.
So we thought to create a tool which using Github’s APIs allows us to search particular skills and services in the whole organization connecting people and facilitating the communication between them.

First day

On the first day, there was a pinch where every idea was presented by each submitter to explain it to the rest of the participants.
After that, we started to form the teams, a beautiful peculiarity of this part was that EVERYONE could join every team. Remotely or physically.

We formed a team of 5 amazing components.
We called that team: The Jellyfishes ✨

After that, we started our small inception to establish our goals and track path.

Defining technologies and the first tasks.

Tech

For our project, we decided to use a stack that allows us to have a fast bootstrapping and at the same time to write code quickly so we chose Typescript and Express.js, we opted to use AWS’ services (DDB, EC2, SSM) and to retrieve all the information we used GraphQL for Github’ APIs.

Start

We decided also to use Jenkins and CloudFormation using Github to have a CI/CD to start our project following all the best practices in spite of the short amount of time we had. (less than one week) Following the principle of quality over quantity.

Thanks to some templates that AutoScout24 provided to us , we were able to have our pipeline up and running

metrics and logs

before the end of the day!!

The week

This was an intense week, challenging and fun.
We put our hands on services and languages never used before pairing with people we never paired with, learn and teach from/to each other.
During the week we tried to follow all the agile best practices starting from the standup, continuing doing TDD and pair, finishing with a speed feedback session.

End of the week and final considerations

We didn’t win the challenge but we won something I believe has more value than a concrete prize.
We won the opportunity to improve our knowledge, to work on something different with new technologies over new challenges.
We won the occasion to share our knowledge and experiences with different people and learn from them.

So I just want to say thank you to everybody who helped me during this week, to @ThoughtWorks and @Scout24 to give to me these opportunities for grown up, become a better developer and a better person.
See you next year for the next Hack Week!