Last Friday was a bit special at Ice. We didn’t work the way we’re used to or on the things we’re used to. Instead, we welcomed the fourth edition of our Hackday!
What's a Hackday?
On Hackday, Ice people form teams to work on different projects together. All of the projects have a different purpose. Some focus on extending our offer, others make our working life easier and maybe even more fun. At the end they all have something in common: they’re EPIC!
Pepping the Hackday
A few weeks before the event, everyone is invited to present their epic ideas. Then, we all vote for the ones we think are most interesting, innovative or funny to do on Hackday. Finally, it’s time to sign up for the project that you want to join and you and wait (impatiently) for the Hackday!
Finally! Hackday arrives
Every hackday has its own theme. This time, because of the cold weather, we wanted to focus on comfort food and a cozy feeling. We asked our Chef, Michiel, to show off his skills. As always, we couldn’t be more pleased! At breakfast and for lunch we got some crazy dishes like mini hamburgers and Mac&Cheese. Everything we needed with this weather!
Hacking away the day
After our breakfast kick-off, everyone went to their team to start working on their projects. Since we can all join, it’s a good opportunity to work with people you don’t usually work with and create new connections. At IceMobile, we believe that magic happens at the intersection and Hackday is a good example of this. Bringing all kinds of people with different backgrounds together lifts our projects to a new level! In only one day, we were able to build some incredible things.
Here are two examples. Since we want to be more sustainable, one of the teams brainstormed to create an app that could reduce our food waste. After the brainstorming session, they decided that the app would tell how many people would join lunch every day. In one day, they created the complete app! The app would let us create our own profile, where we can manage our day-to-day schedule and indicate if we’re in or out of the office for lunch. This would definitely help us calculate how much food we need and it helps us reach our goal to be more sustainable.
Another example was the plant sensors team. We have lots of plants in the office but we don’t all have green fingers. To help us keep our plants healthy, they put sensors into the plant’s soil. These sensors send notifications via the wifi to tell us how the plant is doing. To make the project really Icy, they asked Niels, one of our former colleagues who was really into plants, to send over some pictures of him that could illustrate the plant’s health.
The grand finale
At the end of the day, we organized an IceMarket. On the market, everyone could visit the project demos to see what the others had been up to. This was also the time to vote for the best project. There’s a lively competition between the teams to win the famous light saber. This is the ultimate prize of our Hackdays. In fact, we’ve been passing this prize along to the winning team of all our hackdays.
The winner of this edition was team Tamagotchi. They created an app that would let shoppers feed a Tamagotchi with products they bought at a retailer store to make, and keep, it happy and healthy. The winning team was followed closely by the plant sensors team and the Icegreen app. All these teams presented a fully completed project which was a real achievement! After the award ceremony it was time to get together, talk about the day and welcome the weekend.
This edition was a real success and we’re already looking forward to Hackday 5!
