Salesforce has been ranked the most innovative company four years in a row! One reason may be our strong “intra-preneur” spirit: where creative ideas and the inner drive to achieve them is well matched.
Our tri-annual Hackday provides anyone in Technology and Products (not just engineers) the opportunity to take 24 hours and do the following:
- build an app
- create a tool
- fix a major pain-point
- hack together a proof of concept for a new product category
- make an internal process better.
Employees are encouraged and supported by all levels of management to step away from their day-to-day responsibilities and participate in our Hackdays.
The format and rules of our Hackday are simple:
- Contestants have 24 hours to build, create or change whatever they might want.
- Each participant or team gives a 3-minute presentation to our judges.
- We get together to cheer on the teams and watch the demos!
At our latest Hack Day, we had over 40 Hackday teams present their project (a new record)! The variety of projects was incredible. Over 75 people attended the demos live and 100 dialed in remotely. Those who were physically present enjoyed the standard hackathon food pyramid: pizza, beer, candy and other “brain food”.
Hackday wouldn’t be successful without the support of top management volunteers to judge the entries. This year, our judging panel consisted of: Cathy Polinksi, VP of Engineering; Fiaz Hossain, CTO, Site Reliability; Andrea Leszek, VP, Technology Services; Dave Carroll, Senior Director, Developer Marketing; Doug Scott, SVP, Software Engineering; Mike Christian, VP, Site Reliability Engineering; and, Vanita Nemali, VP, Software Engineering.
The judges had many difficult decisions, but they were able to narrow the field and select the following winners:
People’s Choice Award
(voted on by our live and remote attendees)
Salesforce Software Manager: Chris Tammariello, Chris McNair, Srinivas Dhruvakumar, Noel Golding
Records and automates the software installation and the configuration process. This allows teams to remain consistent and reduces the time it takes to set up a new machine.
Most Innovative
Siri1 Omni Publisher: Ben Snyder
“Siri-like” controls for Salesforce1. Create records and posts from unstructured text, meeting notes, chat transcripts, or transcribed text from voice processing software.
Caffeine Award
(super-charged idea that is exciting)
RinCoffee: Heaven Chen
A web application that allows Salesforce employees to put in our coffee order in advance, so we can quickly pick it up at our café instead of waiting in line. It is also a coffee manager application for the baristas at our cafe so that they manage all the coffee orders on an iPad instead of a queue of cups. All the orders are updated in real time.
Superhero Award
(did you really do this in 24 hours?!?) Sure!
Deployment Dashboard: Gang Luo and Bilal Ahmad
A dashboard that shows all current deployments in progress and past deployments history. Trying to solve the challenge of identifying the status of each target host. This also enhances the collaboration among release engineers.
Painpoint Award
CodeOwn: John Brock and Tyler Crimm
Static ownership information about source files in a huge code-base may not be telling the “real” story about who has the most knowledge or insight about a piece of code. CodeOwn allows anyone to determine implicit file ownership based on recent activity, commit frequency and commit relevance. It also gives users the ability to answer interesting questions through the evaluation of commit history.
Customer Focus
No Org IDs: Vijay Swamidass
Chrome extension which translates 15-char Salesforce org ids into customer names to enable the user to instantly recognize customers in any website (Salesforce, GMail, monitoring and management apps).
WTH Award
(we weren’t sure what you were thinking, but it is awesome!)
Chatter Stickers: Jiahan Jiang and Nate Black
Express your thoughts and feelings with pictures. Transform hashtags into stickers to bring your chatter posts alive!
Join Us!
Want to be part of our team and participate in our next Hackday? We’re hiring! Visit http://www.salesforce.com/tech to find your #dreamjob.