A little bit about Kindred Hackday: first, come up with an idea you would like to develop, maybe a problem you would like to find an answer to or a solution that you would like to improve. Then you find team members that you believe can contribute. After that, you have 24 hours to come up with a solution and in the end, one team stands as the winner.
This was Naveen Maanju’s fourth, and the winning round of Hackday. He is the team leader of "Service maxload dashboard", so we asked him to share his experience with us.
Hi Naveen, congratulations! What made you participate in Hackday?
I think Hackday is the best place to give your ideas a try. This time around, we wanted to improve a tool we developed during the previous session.
How did you form your team?
It’s still the same team as last time - Richard Nysäter and me, with a new addition of Rasmus Kockum. Rasmus was willing to join us this time to contribute towards this tool with new ideas.
What was the name of your team and was there a meaning behind it?
The name of our team was "Service maxload dashboard" and the name itself relates to our winning idea, which you will find out about shortly.
Can you explain your idea and contribution?
The idea was to enhance the automation tool that tracks the max load of service on Splunk daily and update the NFR numbers on bitbucket. This tool was developed in Q1 2021 Hackday and this time we decided to enhance it further, by adding support for InfluxDB to pull and push the metrics. This enhancement will make the Grafana dashboard a single place to view all the information related to a component including the max load it has been through.
Why did you pick this exact theme?
It was always hard to get the max load number for a component and keep them updated, as a team must make sure they do Splunk queries on regular basis (within the next 3 months, as Splunk can retain data for max 3 months). Executing queries is time-consuming, so to overcome all this, we decided to automate it.
Did you notice a difference in attending Hackday while working from home?
Yes, I think so. Working as a team in an office is more effective compared to working from home. You don't need to wait for your team member to look at the message and revert back, instead, you get it answered immediately.
Why do you think your team won?
I think the idea was really good and people like it. This will save a lot of man-hours that were spent to maintain the NFRs in different teams. For sure this is going to be a useful tool for Kindred.
What were the hardest and the easiest parts of participating in Hackday?
I think the hardest part is to make sure we get everything working by the time we need to present the demo. The easiest was the coordination between team members on the tasks. Even though we were working from home, we managed to get things working.
Would you consider participating again?
Yes, we already have some new ideas that we want to work on in the future.
Any tips and tricks you can share with future participants of Hackday?
If you have an idea, no matter how big or small, just enter and start working on it!
