As 2021 came to a close, SADA hosted our first-ever fully remote hackathon. This one-day event featured six teams with participants around the globe racing against time to produce workable demos of cloud-based applications. All were united by the theme, “Enabling remote work and delivering value to our customers through global delivery.”
Says SADA CTO Miles Ward, “Hackathons are an incredible way to kickstart innovative new ideas without overthinking them. Teams have limited time and resources to come up with something workable. The best part is seeing so many cool, outside-the-box ideas come to life.”
Afterward, SADA’s global workforce was invited to vote on the teams’ projects. The winning team, led by SADA Content Editor Ryan Boudinot, produced a demo of the World Integration Loop, a platform that incorporates geospatial data into video games.
The variety of projects produced by the hackathon reflected SADA’s diverse skills and deep bench of engineering talent. Teams included members from North America and SADA’s Global Development Center in Armenia working around the clock across at least twelve time zones.
In addition to the World Integration Loop, teams produced a Terraform initializer, an AI that reads medicine bottles to assist tele-health providers, a multicloud billing dashboard, an interactive questionnaire, and a tool that analyzes tech industry hiring trends.
“The most valuable part of this experience was getting to glimpse what it’s like for SADA’s customers to engage with such inventive and tireless engineering talent,” winning team leader Boudinot says, “From the moment the hackathon started, every team exploded out of the gate. I was blown away by how quickly each team turned novel concepts into workable code.”
The event was a test for SADA of how globally distributed teams can collaborate. In 2021, SADA established its first European office in Yerevan, Armenia, followed soon thereafter by the establishment of the company’s headquarters in India, serving all of Asia.
“What an incredible advantage to work with talented engineers who are twelve time zones away from the West Coast of North America,” says Boudinot, “This is just the first of countless more opportunities for global collaboration with SADAians who are all thinking one step ahead, worldwide.”
“We’ve collected data that is already helping SADA deliver globally at scale and with the same level of quality as in North America,” says Alex Zadorozhnyi, Manager, Infrastructure Modernization, who organized the event. “I’m already seeing huge interest to continue working on the ideas outside the hackathon ecosystem. New ideas are already lining up for our next SADA hackathon, which will include even more teams around the globe.”
