On February 4th PubMatic’s second Hackathon kicked off across three of our global offices in Pune, India, Redwood City, California and New York City. Creative minds began working excitedly as the sun began to rise. Most developers worked through the night and cranked code for thirty-two hours straight.
PubMatic’s Hackathon, dubbed “The Innovation Contest” brought employees with various skillsets (ranging from data science to Java) and across different functions (from product management to IT) together to form thirty-seven teams in total. 121 innovators came forward with their ideas to participate and build the most innovative technology in the industry. Ideas aligned with three key themes – the future of ad-tech, infrastructure optimization, and automation. Initiatives ranged from innovative ways of rendering multi-sized ads to building new analytics solutions.
Employees love the Hackathon event as it encourages everyone to bring an idea to fruition with the time and resources to do so. Teams have a chance to code something together that they’ve always wanted to code and develop a feature or product that will help our customers thrive.
Kuldeep Ghadge, one of the hackathoners and Senior Tech Lead on the Quality Assurance team said: “It was great to freely explore all aspects of the platform, user interface, backend, and network while continuously making improvements before the deadline.”
“Engineers chose projects that were outside of their comfort-zone. Big Data teams learned UI development skills and developed the UI for a Big Data idea,” said Girish Parashar, Director of Big Data, Pune.
On the last day the hustle increased as 2 pm approached, 90 minutes before the final submissions were due. Evaluations started at 3:30 pm, with each evaluation limited to a strict 15 minutes for presentation and demo. We were honored to be joined by Maneesh Bhandari, a fellow graduate of IIT Kharagpur, and an Angel investor, as one of our external judges. Other judges were – Srikannan Gopalsamy, VP engineering Big Data and Data Science, Jayant Kulkarni, VP engineering, Ankur Srivastava, Director of Products, Manish Kalbande, Director of engineering, Prasad Menon , QA manager, Kunal Kuntalam, Manager technical escalations, Prashant Mahajan, Director of Engineering, Ritesh Pai, Product Manager, Girish Parashar, Director of Engineering.
Projects were judged based on the following criteria:
- Innovation and thoughtfulness
- ROI / effectiveness of the project
- Quality of the code, documentation, presentation
- Team work
The first round of eight finalists were declared at 8pm. The final selection will take place on Friday, February 12. We look forward to seeing the winning ideas!
