The First Hack Day
The Digital Lab exists at Purolator in part to share the innovative spirit with the rest of the Purolator IT organization.
Those who have worked at modern tech companies are familiar with company “hack days”, “hackathons”, “20% time” or whatever mechanism you have for occasionally having a day away from normal projects to work on something novel, innovative, and professionally interesting.
The Purolator Digital Lab organized the first Hack Day at Purolator IT in September 2021, and it went extremely well.
30 participants spent all day working on projects ranging from an automated 🐓 chicken coop roller, PowerBI dashboards, a traditional native land lookup tool, to a new Apple-esque commercial for one of our projects.
Hack Day wasn’t a competitive hack-a-thon, nor were there particular rules about what to hack towards. Encouraging professional development, the goals were to:
- Challenge yourself to learn something
- Generate something novel that you can demo, success or failure
- Prepare a short demo for your peers
The mandatory 3 minute demo, and general pace of the day were a challenge for participants – a gym workout for the innovative part of your work brain. The demo’s were awesome, and were a celebratory event 🎉.
Run It Back
We are already planning a follow-up Hack Day for mid-December, at the height of the logistics Peak 🎄 where nobody is allowed to touch production systems anyway .. so might as well hack!
Thanks
Big thanks to our man CIO Ricardo for encouraging the day.
The event was additionally sponsored by Amazon Web Services, who gifted us an excellent intro chat on innovation, t-shirts, Echo products, and AWS technical support. Thanks for their generosity, with both time and resources.