It has been an awesome week at MongoDB! We just wrapped up our second week-long hackathon of 2021.
On one hand, it feels extravagant for a company to tell people to go work on something interesting for a week that isn’t on the critical path.
On the other hand, this is the second time this year that I’ve written a new app in a week, using different aspects of our product like a developer would and learning a ton.
As an employee, I’ve really valued the opportunity to pick up new tech and devote a solid block of time to it, versus the nights and weekends of peacemeal learning I’d have to do alongside my regular day job. It’s great for my continuing education as a developer, and it’s also great for my mental health and general motivation to make real progress on a “for fun” project.
It’s also great for the company for me to use different aspects of our tech. It gives me first-hand experience to use in crafting our docs and code examples, and there are definitely places I’m planning to improve. It also gives me empathy for the devs who use our products on a daily basis, and a new understanding of different tasks and user journies that might make their lives easier. (And let’s not forget - some of the awesome hackathon projects actually make it into the company products as new features - talk about a success story!)
Huzzah for another hackathon! Learned a ton and am feeling rejuvenated for work going into the winter.
(Oh, and what did I work on? I wrote a SwiftUI app that uses Realm Database and Realm Sync to persist data to MongoDB Atlas. I’ve started a couple of personal projects with this tech but haven’t finished any of them - learned a ton I can apply to my hobby apps and hopefully get them going soon! And I got to look at pictures of cute dogs. What’s not to like? 😁)