Developers Neil Kapoor and Archana Aiyer co-authored this blog. 

What do you think when you hear the phrase “Dev Camp”? For most, it would sound like a week filled with technical sessions by monotonous speakers, and a room full of bleary eyed developers trying to absorb the knowledge being imparted. Well, what if we told you it’s actually 3 days, 80 developers, 2 awesome, engaging content sessions, plus an epic hackathon? Welcome to the Bluewolf Dev Camp. This event focused on bringing in the Bluewolf and IBM tech teams under one roof for a couple of days to mingle, learn, and develop cool projects, while having lots of fun.

Being a Bluewolf Developer

Bluewolf is a great place to do work as developers because there is a lot of support and a lot of training involved to make sure all of the developers are on par with the technology we are working with. Our specialty here is Salesforce, and since it is constantly changing there’s a big emphasis on making sure we stay on top of the technology. Salesforce Lightning is so new, not many of us on the developer team had done a lot of work with it before. The hackathon gave us great exposure to the technology and a good opportunity to experience and learn with it because we had to build our hackathon project using Lightning’s UI.

Every Day Development

Day to day work as a Bluewolf developer consists mostly of project work for clients. Many of us work remotely much of the time. About 50-70% of the day we’ll have our heads down, developing and coding or architecting a solution for a client. The other piece of time is spent on the phone discussing status updates or providing support to a client. We also meet daily with the project managers and solution architects assigned to each project to ensure we are all coordinating well. Dev Camp was especially fun for each of us because it gave us the opportunity to meet and work with new team members in person.

Our Hackathon Experience

The hackathon included key sessions on both IBM Watson’s API as well as Salesforce’s Lightning. For our hackathon project, we all had to incorporate both of these technologies and these sessions gave us an excellent opportunity to understand and learn about them before beginning. Hackathons are really important to the growth of a developer team because they help to make sure we’re on par with the technologies we’re working with. Plus, in a global company like Bluewolf it gives us a chance to meet with other developers and technical team members and that face time is a great opportunity to connect and learn. There was even someone from London on our team during this year’s hackathon! There was also an IBM developer so we got to work with him and learn more about IBM’s technologies, which we are really excited to be incorporating into our work.

The Best Part— Our Project 

Bluewolf has a code repository with reusable assets— code snippets that can be reused in certain situations. Our hackathon project was a fast, efficient way to search for and locate reusable assets with keywords. This way developers don’t have to continually re-write the same piece of code over and over or waste time searching for a piece of pre-written code. The tool had a Lightning interface and Watson’s API helped make the search more predictive and intelligent. Most of us worked through the night to get our projects completed and the management team made sure to stock up on food and treats for the late night snacking! Our favorite part of the hackathon was getting to show off our projects, first to a panel of judges and then to the whole group of developers. The lack of sleep did not hamper our excitement, we tested our projects for any final errors, polished our presentation skills and presented our projects to the panel of judges. Unfortunately, for many there could be only one winner. Everyone put together amazing presentations, and while we were not the winners the winning team truly did deserve the prize.

Here are some fun statistics about the Dev Camp 2016

All in all, this was a great experience where we had a lot of fun while learning about great technologies with a great group of people. We cannot wait to see what next year’s Dev Camp has in store for everyone! 

Interested in joining our team? Attend a recruiting happy hour at Dreamforce or view all open positions here.