On 24th November, Annalect India launched its first hackathon with an aim to ideate, innovate, prototype and build. Annalectuals were invited to take a break from the daily hustle and be a part of 2 exciting days of tech innovation. Total 16 teams comprising cross-functional members participated in Virtual Brainstorming, Collaborative Coding and Presentation sessions. The teams successfully completed a variety of projects including digital marketing apps, process improvement utilities and other productivity tools.
Through this Hackathon, Annalect Engineering team brought together people from different technical streams to collaborate, brainstorm and solve a functional and technical challenge, create a functioning software or product prototype. Annalect Hackathon is going to be the solutioning route to digital marketing technical problems.
Problem Solving and Prototyping
Annalect Hackathon was a 2-day event. Theme of the Hackathon was “Optimize, Automate and Visualize”. It was all about Learn, Define and Build. Build working model protype using open tools, which could ultimately help Omni and other agency products. The themes were designed with the approach:
- Get creative with datasets: Since Annalect is a data-driven company, the datasets were opened to developers to build interesting applications and pipelines.
- Build and Enhance Web components: To support Omni UI and create immersive web components. These are portable components for future agency product development and a next step to enhance the existing ones to achieve maximum usability.
- Dig Deeper on Product Tech-Debt: Utilize this opportunity and time to build innovative and optimized solutions for productised technical problem solving.
- Quality Automation: This was great opportunity for Q-Hackers and also enabling Advanced APIs & Data testing, writing automated tests and creating CI.
- ML Engineering: Introducing Machine Learning and AI in our tools. Hackers used the hackathon to find creative uses with the caveat to design and build application prototypes withing the technology ecosystem we have.
The evaluation
The evaluation process began with a set of criteria ranging from technical innovation and design to commercial potential and overall impact on the network. Bonus points were awarded to the teams for exploring a futuristic aspect, unearthing new learnings, delivering impactful pitch and presentation, among other things. To keep this challenge objective & encourage best practices at the same time, a panel of 3 judges scored the submissions based on a set of criteria that included technical innovation, design, commercial potential, and impact to our network. They also selected a few projects for problem solving in a new or niche area.
The Winning Streak
After the evaluation was time for pitching ideas to the panel. Woot woot! We had a winning team and 2 Runner Up teams.
We saw some amazing projects and prototypes and the winning team created Automatic Test Analyzer which is a test automation report analysis tool that can perform automated analysis of failed scripts and provide a detailed, insightful report. This tool significantly reduces the manual effort involved. The tool automatically creates Jira Tickets with all required details for detailed investigation.
We had Mihir Dash, Sachin Pawar, Rashmitha Shetty and Bisma Majid – the team behind building Automatic Test Result Analyzer!
We had two Runner Up teams. Runner Up team 1 created a Metadata Driven Framework that helps developers to concentrate on core logic & not on language syntax. The minds behind this were Aishwarya Gowda, KondiSetti Sriram, Akshaya Manikuttan and Madhav Giri.
Runner Up team 2 created Influencer Marketing experience by integrating the complete life cycle of an influencer marketing Ad to an application. The idea was to enable a brand reach out to specific audience through influencers using this platform.
Other teams at the Hackathon — Meet the teams
Being #Futureready
We were thrilled with the overwhelmingly positive response to the hackathon, not just from the participants, but also from the entire management team.
This was the first hackathon held in Annalect India, an event that brought employees together across disciplines to inspire more organic connection and collaboration. This Hackathon reflects Annalect’ s culture and vision to empower every employee to do more and get it right the first time.