Innovation Takes Center Stage at Spring NYC Office Hackathon

September 18, 2023 Andy Glassman

At Watermark, we cultivate innovative use of technology by holding multiple hackathons throughout the year. Teams of engineers dedicate two days to dive deep into a topic or technology they want to try out, or explore an idea that is in the back of their mind. Hackathons allow engineers to stretch their creative boundaries and see what’s possible. This in turn gives teams a wider perspective when approaching their upcoming projects.

The results produced in such a condensed time frame are impressive. Don’t take our word for it! Take a look at the results of the recent Hackathon in our New York City office.

Watermark Share

spring nyc office hackathon with watermark
Team Members: Pranav Raj Tyagi, James Stephens, and Attaullah Malik
Project: Watermark Share is a proof of concept that allows solution specialists, and client admins to easily share, and distribute files. Files are stored securely in AWS: S3.

GraphQL

Watermark implementation of GraphQL that retrieves institution data.
Team Members: Marcos Trinidad
Project: Learn, and create an implementation of GraphQL that retrieves institution data.

Conway’s Game of Life

nyc hackathon with watermark insights
Team Members: Alex Boland, Martin Maugeais, and Michael Quoma
Project: Harness the power of web sockets and Elixir’s parallel processing capabilities to make a parallelized version of Conway’s Game of Life.

Watermark Champions

Watermark Champions tracks wins and losses of employees at Watermark
Team Members: Akeem Boatswain and Andre Mattis
Project: Watermark Champions tracks the wins and losses between employees of Watermark in multiple games played in the office. The idea came from the discovery that a lot of people in the office play and are really good at some games that other employees are not aware about.

Real time Data Manager Admin Activity

Phoenix Channels and Presence APIs NYC Hackathon with Watermark
Team Members: Tom Schuster
Project: A proof of concept using the Phoenix Channels, and Presence APIs to show who is logged in to the system, and prevent administrators running conflicting system updates at the same time.

Lunch

Lunch is a web app used in the NYC hackathon with watermark
Team Members: Adrienne Johnson, Jamie Huenefeld, Pinkesh Soni, and Alex Swaim
Project: Lunch is a web app that helps you find a great spot for lunch within a certain radius of your current location. Filter by cuisine type, takeout / dine-in / delivery, and distance.

Watermark Earth Tracker

innovation with watermark during the spring nyc hackathon
Team Members: Michael Del Rio, Sai Nanduri, Kelaiya Parikh, and Jonathan Waldman
Project: Visualize logins into any of our Watermark modules in real time. Leverage the geolocation of IP addresses of logged in users to display their general location on a spinning 3D world map. This is a cool way to show engagement with our tools. We wanted to make this an engaging and immersive experience by adding eye & ear candy. The demo include an animated flyover of the globe!

Participants enjoyed interacting with those they may not normally work with on a daily basis, saying it helped build office camaraderie. “My favorite part was collaborating with individuals I would not interact with during my daily job activities,” said Sai Nanduri, Scrum Master. “It was very nice to put in extra hours with people devoted to the task. It enabled a good sense of camaraderie.”

The Hackathon also let our engineering teams see what others in the organization are interested in and working on, as well as what we could produce together in a tight time frame. “My favorite part of the hackathon was the chance to have a relaxing change of pace from everyday work to work on something new and different that really interests me,” said Akeem Boatswain, Application Architect. “It was also a chance to experiment with some things that would later apply to the projects we are working on.”
watermark employees collaborating during nyc hackathon
Thanks to everyone who participated—we’re already excited to see the creativity and technical expertise to come in future Hackathons!

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