ShipIt X Day: Winter 2017
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On December 14th and 15th, 18 teams of Cerner associates competed for the Golden Trophy during our tenth ShipIt Day. Being this was our tenth, it was fun to reflect back on how this event started and how much it has grown.
It has been great to see ShipIt Days start from small hackathons organically run by individual teams to now an engineering-wide quarterly event that brings together engineers from disparate organizations, allowing for a better cross-pollination of ideas and team members. - Kevin Shekleton
This was our third ShipIt Day hosted at our new Innovations campus. It continues to be a great location for ShipIt because of our awesome game rooms and collaboration spaces. As part of this ShipIt, we had a sponsored theme, which focused on building React applications using Kaiju that are based on Cerner’s consistent Terra UI theme. Team members that support these projects were available to help participants if they wished to use these technologies, helping to gain more feedback on the projects, and to expand the exposure of these projects to ShipIt teams. By including this theme, we also introduced a new category for someone to win by using these projects.
Shirt for participants.
Whiteboard action happening bright and early.
Teams checked in bright and early for kick-off. Vouchers to the cafe were provided so participants could fuel their hard work throughout the day. Workflow was constant with lots of collaboration.
Teams planning out their strategy.
The Assembly filling up before presentations.
Demos always arrive quicker than anticipated. Ready or not, 9am rolled around and demos were in full swing. Teams got 4 minutes to present their projects to a panel of judges, consisting of Michelle Brush, Robert Farr, Tim Erdel, Chad Moats, and Chuck Schneider. Special thank you to those folks for spending their morning with us and supporting ShipIt Day!
Team Delayed Gratification
Coming in first place was Team Delayed Gratification (Russ Star, Ben Hemphill, Morgan Patterson).
Our ShipIt team, Delayed Gratification, worked to complete an existing side project called the “RUSS test,” aka Really Useful Speed Service. The goal is to allow service owners to make smart decisions about where to geographically place their services by providing response time, bandwidth, and other key network metrics.
Congratulations Team Delayed Gratification! A much deserved win.
Team ShipIt X Files
Second place went to Team ShipIt X Files (Santosh Manughala, Carlos Salazar, Matt Horn, Seada Ali).
Our project was to create an application for discovering related database rows that let’s the user quickly navigate back-end data in Millennium, (e.g. look up lots of useful info for a given personnel id, person id, or event id). Each bit of data could be clickable to do a new search on that id (search the person you found on a clinical event in one click). The app displays information so that it is easy to navigate.
Way to go, Team ShipIT X Files!
Team A Near Field Far Far Away
Team A Near Field Far Far Away (Aurko Ghosh, Aaron Kaplan, Vijay Ayilavarapu, Nikhil Agrawal, Neil Pathare) took third place. Their project utilized our MakerSpace!
For ShipIt, we assembled a 3D printed light bridge that provides 180% of bright light for the soldering workbench. In addition to assembly, we designed and attempted to implement an RGB LED controller using a Raspberry Pi 3 and mosfet chips. The controller uses both a physical switch, as well as a mobile app to control the lighting. The mobile app is developed using React Native, and communicates wirelessly with the controller via Near Field Communication (NFC).
Judge Chuck Schneider noted, “I like that they took on a lot of different pieces, which adds to the complexity of the project.”
Team Flying Mongoose
The winners of the sponsored project theme was a veteran team, Flying Mongoose (Mahesh Acharya, Taylor Clay, Cihan Kaynak, Matt Stramel). They were able to start the migration of Cerner’s RxStation to a React application utilizing Terra UI. They were able to utilize Kaiju to build the prototype UI, which had dynamically loaded tables and mock buttons. By using ShipIt to start this transition, they were able to learn a lot of what it would take to make these next steps.
Nicely done Team Flying Mongoose!
People’s Choice Awards
- Favorite Team Name: Keep it on the DL (Eric Fung, Ian Kottman, Sam Livingston, Abhi Mahabalshetti, Will Pruyn)
- Favorite Project: A Near Field Far Far Away (Aurko Ghosh, Aaron Kaplan, Vijay Ayilavarapu, Nikhil Agrawal, Neil Pathare)
- Favorite Presentation: If It Doesn’t Ship, You Must Acquit (Steven Goldberg, Ryan Neff, Jason Xu)
Winning teams walked away with some awesome prizes. Wireless headphones, TileMates, portable chargers, Echo Dots, drones, Google Cardboards, and Lego tape were all up for grabs.
Each ShipIt Day, the projects get more intricate and more creative. The projects presented show off the talent we have. After surveying the participants on their projects, 45% of the projects were identified to improve daily work at Cerner. ShipIt Day remains one of our most popular dev culture events at Cerner.
First time participant, Ted Segal said, “I’m a new developer, I’m still in the DevAcademy, and I really appreciated the chance to learn about tools and ideas that I had not been exposed to yet from more experienced developers.”
Veteran participant, Alex Harder said he likes participating in ShipIt Day because he enjoys exploring new technologies and applying them to a problem. ShipIt Day continues to be successful among Cerner associates. Whether you want to work on something you don’t normally have time to, or you’re interested in meeting new people, ShipIt Day is a winner!
Save the Date: ShipIt Day returns March 8th and 9th! If you are interested in learning more about other ShipIt Days, see these earlier posts:
