On November 25/26, Verscend ran a 36 hours Hackathon for its employees. The event was titled V-Hackathon|Hack your limits and was envisioned and spearheaded by Sumant Rao, Senior Vice President, Performance Analytics. Event was aimed to pursue hidden talents, boost technical abilities of engineers, generate innovative ideas and be more aggressive towards implementation details, there by adding value to themselves and thus the Verscend.
Project solutions were prearranged under 4 focused themes: Visualization, Machine Learning, Security and a freefall (anything useful in 36 hours). To make team’s strategies more convenient and meaningful, problem statements for each theme and judging criteria were disclosed earlier.
Continuous involvement of organizing committee members and rich number of participants from all the departments made event successful and momentous. In number, 63 engineers distributed among 15 teams participated and came up with awe-inspiring ideas and their production-level implementations. Ideas ranging from hard & critical health analytics business problem to automating day-to-day manual work to applying ML (Machine Learning) and NLP (Natural Language Processing) state-of-art models to analytics and automation areas of Verscend product lines were key output of the event.
Around 65-70 members in a conference hall for continuous 36 hours, studying, learning, sharing to peers, sleeping, having fun eating/drinking and listening to music yet competing with other teams was a delightful scene to watch. The teams had freedom to code on their beloved languages/frameworks. In summary, teams touched technology stacks like Java, C#, Python, R, Shell Script, Ruby, PL-SQL/T-SQL etc., programming languages like ASP.NET Core, Flask, Spring Boot, Hadoop etc., web/big-data frameworks like Tensorflow, Scikit, Nltk etc. and ML/NLP frameworks and tools. Moreover, utilities like Grok patterns, Cron expressions, D3JS, HighchartsJS etc. made their imaginative output possible in timeframe assigned.
The top three teams were Team Five (Visualization), Team El Seventh Sense (Machine Learning) and Makura (Security) voted by 10 juries. Each participant received a token of appreciation from Sumant amidst big applause. All teams received cash prizes as well, the top three ideas bagging the highest ones.
