Why Breaking Free From the Routine Matters

December 30, 2015

A routine keeps you focused and on track, so you get work done. Engineers at egnyte follow a routine of Scrum development and different teams release new code every week/two weeks or every month. Following Scrum keeps us on our toes and keeps the engine humming. But this fast paced routine means you are always on a treadmill and sometimes there are so many great things you would like to do, but you can’t find focused time to do it. You make small tweaks to the low hanging fruit, but there are only a few big ones you can do per quarter, since they require more people. As per http://themeaningmovement.com/how-to-break-your-routine/It’s all aboutconserving your willpower to allow you to focus on what matters most to you. But on that day, for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to stay with it. I had committed to this schedule. I had been doing it for months, yet that morning something felt different.Hackathons are a good way for engineers to break their routine, have fun and focus on doing something that doesn’t feel like work, but still adds value to the company. Last month, some of the team members complained that they don’t have time to make fixes that would improve their productivity. I realized that maybe all team members might have something they’re itching tofix to improve productivity, but they don’t have time to build it. As a team we decided to have a hackathon and take a crack at some of them.Two weeks before the hackathon we published a schedule and asked people to form teams and list their projects. A total of 10 engineering teams participated in it and there were some interesting projects that came out of it like:-

Network Intelligence monitor to detect slow speeds geographically
Elasticsearch GCS backup plugin
Orphan file detector
Speed up Content indexing
Auto Documentation of internal rest APIs
Continuous testing in eclipse while writing code
Speed up Jenkins build
Upgrading old libraries

Once in awhile breaks in the routine make your life better. Are you a team player who wants to join in on our hackathon fun? We are hiring, so check out our Jobs page and contact us at jobs@egnyte.com if you are interested in being a part of our amazing team at Egnyte.Some pictures from hackathon: