EBSCO held its first-ever Hackathon in January. The two-day event brought together 35 of EBSCO’s 500 developers, organized them into teams and let the coding begin.
The Hackathon was the brainchild of Lee Francis, Web Client Development Manager at EBSCO. The goal was simple: bring developers together, have them present an idea they believe will be the most beneficial for the company, spend two days with their team developing their ideas, and then present their work to the group. While the name “Hackathon” may conjure up images of caffeine-fueled all-night coding sessions (a la The Social Network), those attending said it was not so much competitive as collaborative, presenting an opportunity for the developers to work together on a project they generate and have a personal stake in, and funneling that passion into innovations that will benefit the company, and ultimately, our customers.
Such a wide array of developers working on the Hackathon also brought a plethora of unique ideas; some of these included: BackstopJS, a program to inspect CSS (Cascading Style Sheets); a way to make sure images are uploaded with the highest quality; and adding Git hooks to HTML code to ensure branch naming conventions are respected.
Technology also helped bring remote teams together at the Hackathon. While most of the developers work out of EBSCO’s headquarters in Ipswich, Massachusetts, developers from Durham, North Carolina and Knoxville, Tennessee took part in the action as well, via webcam.
Organizers are not expecting the Hackathon to be just a one-time deal. This first Hackathon involved the EBSCO Application Engineering team, but the goal is to expand this to other teams. With hundreds of developers at EBSCO, the potential for growth and creativity is massive and by exposing developers to one another in a new way — having them provide the inspiration and leveraging that teamwork and passion — the goal is to provide a place where individual developers can come together to create innovative new technologies for EBSCO Information Services.