Hackathon provides teams the chance to explore new ideas
More than 40 employees from Bio-Rad’s Life Science Software Development team met in our Northern California headquarters earlier this year for a lively “Hackathon.” From January 30 to February 3, the employees formed into teams to collaborate on exciting technological projects and then presented their solutions and demos at the end of the week.
John Norby, a Software Development Manager for Bio-Rad, says the Hackathon allowed team members to meet in person from locations including California, Texas, Michigan, and even Israel. “We’ve all been through a pandemic for the last two years, so we wanted to see if we could get everybody together face to face.”
John also says that the Hackathon provided employees the chance to explore new skillsets and specialties outside of their current roles. “It gives them a vision of something different than what they are doing on a daily basis,” John says. “We wanted people to be able to experiment with technologies and things that they haven’t been able to use.”
As to the types of projects that employees focused their work around, John says most were related to current projects already underway. “There were a lot of people who picked things that were adjacent to the projects we’re working on,” he says. “I think it really links directly to Bio-Rad's entrepreneurial spirit, because people came up with their own ideas and figured out how to do it,” John says.
John says the idea for this collaborative event was borrowed from Bio-Rad's Clinical Diagnostics Group, whose software development team also held a global hackathon in 2022 across the US, Israel, Poland, and India. Both teams plan to hold more in the future.
In the end, John says the hackathons help bring forward new ideas that Bio-Rad may be able to utilize in the future. “Even if we don’t gain product level implementation of something, we've shown how you can do it, and what the parts are you need to collect and get it done.”
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