Earlier this year, Grubhub had its first Hackathon. Our group (Team Braveheart) ended up placign second, which was an awesome thing to have happened. And part of placing second involved a significant cash award – which we used to fund a celebratory night out at The Aviary. Because why not?
Tonight made me think back to my Emmis Interactive days. I’ve had the good fortune to be a part of teams where everyone enjoys each others’ company, and folks genuinely like hanging out with one another – even after our work responsibilities end.
Today, I met up with Luis outside his hotel pretty early in the morning. We talked about getting him a Ventra card (for the CTA) and touring a few neighborhoods along the Blue Line.
This is about as far as I got with mine. My joke was that Sajit’s last gesture before he left was to leave all of us with a small bit of work that was impossible to finish.
Sajit’s been Team Lead the entire time I’ve been with Grubhub, and to say he’s been a rock is an understatement. He’s been the go-to guy for so many things, and his departure is really going to be a big thing.
While the team will evolve with this change, it’s bittersweet timing in that with Luis’ arrival we’re also seeing Sajit’s departure.
Recently, Grubhub brought him in full time and he was able to travel and live in the US officially. Today – he boarded a train, and Zohair and Shyamal met him at O’Hare.
Only much later did we learn that today was his first plane ride. Talk about big first steps.
Our team at work has started to read “Clean Code,” by Robert Martin. Several other teams in the company have done this as well (reading it collectively, and scheduling meeting times to discuss each chapter). It’s a bit like homework, but I’m actually really glad we’re doing it.
On the heels of our off site work event yesterday, tonight several of us at work had plans to stay late to play some board games.
Some context: the work our team does supports the Care organization at Grubhub. And the internal name for the application is “Carebear,” and our team name is “Braveheart.”
Most people, when hearing the name “Braveheart,” tend to associate it with the Mel Gibson movie. But really, it’s a Carebear thing.
Honestly, I kind of liked the fact that our trophy was imperfect. As that seemed to hold with the spirit of the hackathon itself. But it was quite nice that our company decided a replacement was worth it.
You’re not going to believe this: we got second place!
L to R it’s Zohair, Shyamal, Yibo (our intern), me, and Anjana. We’re holding a placeholder trophy, as the real one is getting shipped to us from NY.
Overall, there were 75 projects shared during the Semi-Finals. As we were waiting for our turn, I realized the WiFi was totally slow in the room, due to all the other folks who had their laptops going nearby. And so the idea of a “real time demo” kind of went out the door.
Here’s the super interesting thing: while we were all in the same physical space and all in the same map, we were each seeing very different parts of the map.
Someone could be next to you, physically, in the real world. But in the VR game they would be two floors above you, maybe 30 feet away.
We don’t do this sort of thing often, but I really enjoyed hanging out with folks and chatting a bit outside of the context of our day to day. I learned a good amount about my coworkers, and just got to talk about other stuff that wasn’t all work or sprint related.
At the start of the night, most folks had one or two glow necklaces. About 30 minutes into the first band’s set, people started to throw down these other lights: soft, foam tubes that held an embedded LED.