How do you unleash innovation in an organization with rich talent? Especially when engineers have many ideas and features that they are really passionate about but cannot find time to work on them because there are always more urgent and immediate things on any single day?

Enter a Hack Day event. The Hack Day event provides the perfect opportunity for passionate employees to block times on their calendars, bring their favorite idea to the forefront, form teams with like-minded employees within the organization, and just hack away. I’ve seen this concept work like magic in companies like Yahoo and Intuit. Today, we’re having our first Hack Day event at Druva!

A Hack Day Event

The Druva Hack Day, a 24-hour code marathon, began today at 9AM. The participation from engineers and QA has been almost at a 100%, which is amazing! We have 19 teams (1-3 people) working on their passionate ideas as we speak. We also have our fearless leader, Jaspreet, hacking his favorite idea. Common sights as you walk along the offices are huddles, whiteboard discussions, intense coding, and camaraderie, all of which one would expect to find in a successful hack day event.

We have the final presentations scheduled tomorrow morning at the end of the 24-hour event, so everyone can share their latest and greatest creations with the rest. Exciting awards await the winners, whose works will be judged based on their creativity, technical difficulty, and most of all, the impact in the market and on our customers. Can’t wait to see what the teams have in store!