This week, Bluewolf’s first Developer Camp kicked-off, a three day gathering of the top talent of Bluewolf Beyond managed services and Services technical communities to learn, code, hack, and bond. During this intensive collaboration, we hosted our first-ever hackathon which 11 teams provided a deeper dive into four key topics that are integral to our business. 

One team was chosen as the overall winner for their topic of choice, and the winning submission was judged based on value to Bluewolf (ie. business potential, cost savings or earnings, etc.), impressiveness, user experience, and creativity in solution.

The winners of Bluewolf’s first Hackathon are:

Dave Hagman, Pike Pullen, Renan Moreira and Elie Hassan for their Natural Language Processing solution.

Challenge overview: Net Neutrality is a fundamental issue that has arisen from the evolution of capitalism and the Internet. As society increases its dependence on persistent networks, the ISPs that provide those networks seek to optimize margins and as a side effect regulate the content that gets served. This impacts the businesses that provide content as well as the consumers that seek to access the content in a fair way. 

Objective: The FCC held an open forum for the general public to post comments on the Net Neutrality policy. An independent group decided to take the comments, clean them, and then ran metrics that inspected the general tone of the comments. The group also posed several questions that propose further avenues of exploration into the comments base. Using any tools and libraries available, process the large data set of comments and devise ways of determining characteristics about the comments.

These brilliant minds walk us through their solution:

1. Why did you pick the natural language topic?
   We were actually the only group that chose natural language. We picked it because we felt it was the most challenging topic, and wanted to see how we could apply it to Salesforce.
2. What was the solution you built?
   Renan created a really cool screencast. There is no audio but it does a walkthrough of the app. We also have a working version in a Dev org, but it would be better for one of us to actually demo it on a conference rather than just letting people in to play around.
3. How do you feel you achieved the goal of the hackathon?
   We took Bluewolf's current vision of employee engagement and mixed that with our solution to create something tailored to our business. 

Our executive judges included Bluewolf CEO Eric Berridge, CTO Lou Fox, Chief of Staff Jolene Chan, and EVP of Strategic Development Glen Stoffel. All solutions needed to resonate to a non-technical audience, meet the judging criteria, and could not solely extend reusable assets. 

The additional topics include:

Salesforce1 / Lightning
Salesforce1 is a big player in the mobile space, and more and more clients are eager to explore what Salesforce1 can do for them. Adding to the Build vs Buy conversation, Salesforce1 is another alternative to consider when rapidly iterating on providing the best experience to users. Similarly, Lightning is one of the newest libraries that Salesforce has exposed on the Force.com platform. By leveraging components native to the platform itself, developers can use reliable tools to build out applications faster instead of having to build out functionality from scratch.

Salesforce APIs
Salesforce has made readily available many APIs, some of which are less prevalently used. These APIs may have use cases that have just not yet been posed, as the right questions have not yet been asked. It is still important to explore the capabilities of these APIs and to be prepared when offering solutions to clients as to whether these existing tools can provide value.

Tools
As an ongoing effort within the Tech Team, tools and projects that serve as a starting point or as assets have been compiled together as a show of what Bluewolf has created over years of work. Some of these tools have been made quickly under the tight timeline of a client project, and some could benefit from further attention to increase the value of the project and applicable use cases.

The Developer Camp featured three incredible days of team building and knowledge sharing — bringing together our top technical talent to code, learn, share, and create. See the photo highlights from the event, and get in touch to learn more about solutions.