ShipIt Days at Cobalt Sign ⚡
We really appreciate the Atlassian company culture and their great products and decided to organise our first ShipIt Days event at Cobalt Sign in early October.
This is an internal event where everyone can work on whatever they want. Everyone can come up with cool project ideas that improve our time together at the office or our own apps and then set up teams and implement the ideas in a short period of time. As Atlassian would say:
”Find what inspires you. Develop that dream feature. Smash your nemesis bug. Or, maybe just upgrade racks in the bike room.
Day 1, Friday, 9 am – Ideas. Teams. Game on!
Challenge Accepted!
We all gathered in the meeting room to share our ideas and build the teams. First, we pitched our ideas and put them on a flipchart. Next came the votes. We each voted the top three preferred ideas. There were teams of two so we drew the line after the first six ideas. Next step: finding teammates and a pizza break.
Implementation started and everybody got busy finding efficient ways to bring their projects to life, all within the 8 working hours. We like our good night’s sleep so no all-nighters.
Let’s ship it!
We had a nice autumn vibe, the sun was shining and – just in time – came Oktoberfest snacks to enjoy while brainstorming techniques and working on shipping strategies for Demo Day. Weissbier, sausages and pretzels gave us energy and when that wasn’t enough we relied on our beloved coffees and teas.
Day 2, Saturday – Think. Do. Rewind. Have a beer!
The next day everyone was free to organise their schedule however they wanted, most of the teams gathered again at the office to finish their projects.
Everybody was focused on making their ideas work until Sunday morning. The whole idea of the ShipIt Days at Cobalt Sign was to demo a shippable idea by the end of the event.
- Ready Set Holiday! app for Apple Watch – Marco & Dani
- Timelog assistant for the cobalt signers – Cristi & Adi
- Meeting rooms booking app – Dani & Halil
- A video for Ready Set Holiday! – Roxana & Orsi
- React Native components library – Alex & Agota
- Chatbot for Ready Set Holiday! – Oana & Arthur
Day 3, Sunday Morning – Demo Day. Celebration!
On Sunday we gathered at the office to see the final projects. It is Demo Day!
Our Apple TV and Chromecast were our trusted companions in helping us deliver the demos. We all showcased our projects and talked about the ups & downs we encountered while working.
Time to vote and … drumroll … the winner is …
Marco and Dani’s project: Ready Set Holiday! on Apple Watch.
Congratulations are in place. Great work!
Marco and Dani can call their new Google Home devices their own.
Roxana and I got the second most votes for our Ready Set Holiday! app videos so we each received a pair of Apple’s Earbuds.
After we played around with Google’s Assistant on the shiny new speakers for a bit, we headed to Scotland Yard to enjoy a delicious lunch.
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This was a really cool experience, we had fun and learned a bunch of new things along the way. ShipIt Days was also challenging in a good way. I liked the fact that we had to discuss and figure out ourselves the difficulties we encountered along the way.
We are looking forward to the second ShiptIt Days event.
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