Energy drinks, snack wrappers and nerf darts were littered throughout the engineering department as Trintech’s engineers and other interested team members put development on hold to participate in the company’s first ever Code Games.

Participants were challenged to code, develop and present a new program that enhanced or innovated one of Trintech’s existing Record to Report solutions – all in just 48 hours. Trintechers involved revisited their “I wish” or “It would be nice,” projects, reviewed customer suggestions or simply came up with an entirely new idea and then worked around the clock to make their idea a reality.

Entries included projects which revolved around focused communication, workflow, fraud detection, key performance indicators, product training, embedding capabilities and more. Collaboration was the key to success in such a short time frame and teams were comprised of individuals from a variety of departments, not just engineering.

Teams were encouraged to be creative in their presentations and Trintechers took that request seriously. Some teams began their presentation with a musical number, others gave each other code names, while others still made their presentations dramatic and colorful.

Teams were assessed by a panel of judges comprised of Trintech executives and customers. After a 5-minute presentation period, judges had an opportunity to give feedback and ask questions, and several times judges asked the question, “When can I use this?” as a clear indicator of their support or appreciation for the project they had viewed.

Organizer and Vice President of Engineering, Rocket Williams, said Code Games was a great representative of Trintech’s culture.

“This is truly the culture we are trying to build here at Trintech,” Williams said. “We have to work hard every day to meet the needs of our customers, but we also want to create a culture that promotes fun and gives the development team the opportunity to innovate and come up with new ideas. Some of our best ideas come from the people who work closely with our products and for the first time ever, we had more than one-third of the participants not from engineering, and the results were incredible. Not only did we see a whole new set of ideas and way of thinking, but the product management teams, support team, cloud teams and even marketing brought us some fun and entertaining presentations.”

The winning team, which worked on a program that embeds Excel capabilities within Trintech’s Cadency solution, consisted of Product Owner, James Picard, Product Manager, Michael Uram, QA Engineer, Xavier Allen, Lead Software Developer, Jim Wyatt, Senior Software Engineer, Bill Boyle, and Database Administrator, Scott Legband.

“The games were great,” Picard said. “Considering it was the first one ever, I can’t wait to see how they evolve.  We saw some great innovation across multiple products, and even some projects targeted at helping us internally. Management was fully behind it and so was each department — especially since most had representatives competing on one or more teams. I can’t wait to defend our title at the next one!”

Trintech plans to host another Code Games soon. Want to be a part of it? Consider joining our team.

 

Written by: Sam King

A Peek Inside the Trintech Code Games 2017