A happy hackathon in Helsinki

Paf brought all of its most creative and analytical technical minds together in one room to create new solutions in an intensive day-long Hackathon.

On 18 November Paf gathered together 35 people from across its development and operational teams at a tech hub in the centre of Helsinki. This company hackathon was the first one that was so wide-ranging – where everybody at Paf could take part.

Bringing people together who don’t work together

The main motivation behind such a company-wide hackathon was to bring diverse technical minds together in one room. This sort of synergy serves to improve skills and knowledge by solving problems from different teams and different technical areas. One example of this is Chaitra from our database development team, who joined in on our security session called Capture The Flag.

“I’ve always been interested in how to secure our code and I wanted to know more about hacking techniques,” says senior software engineer Chaitra Shanthappa.

Improving communication and team spirit

Above all the hackathon was about having fun. Bringing people together not only clarifies the common goals the teams at Paf have, it also creates a unity of spirit. The topics were carefully chosen to bring the best out of everybody in attendance.

“The company is genuinely interested in improvement and wants to give us a chance to explore and learn new technologies,” says software engineer Alberto Alonso.

The four topics covered a range of key technical issues

The hackathon covered four topics – AWS App Mesh, Sumologic and automated dashboards, Jenkins ECS pipeline for node.js and a pure hacking exercise. Each topic was made up of a range of planned tasks that needed to be allocated, analysed and completed to meet our business needs.

“This Hackathon was a great event in all aspects and we created two concrete solutions that we will implement. We are really looking forward to organising more hackathons in the near future” says Paf’s Chief Technology Officer Francois Maugis.