One of our most experienced employees, Suresh Kotha, was part of the winning team in a recent Hackathon held at one of our clients, NatWest Group.
The team of 6, the “Infra Hackers”, competed against more than 20 other teams to build a working prototype using DevOps principles tasked with addressing a business challenge or introducing a new innovative way of working.
Their solution, an end to end release automation tool, integrated with the key tools used across the NatWest Group to deliver an end-to-end change governance solution. It was built in 2 weeks and there were multiple rounds of judging from senior roles in the organisation including Head of IT.
Suresh, with extensive experience in infrastructure and development, was tasked with install and setup of the tools, building the Jenkins pipeline and integrating the tools into the pipeline. Suresh built and configured over 15 software integrations including Bitbucket, Maven, Jenkins Blue Ocean, UCD (UrbanCode Deploy), XL Release, Snow, JMeter, React JS, Tomcat.
Suresh has experience with all these tools although he has never had to setup and integrate so many tools with a new product with such tight timelines. He said the experience was an exhilarating one:
“The things I most enjoyed about this Hackathon were – firstly, it was a very challenging task in short timelines, which really puts the pressure on. But also, as a team we had really proactive discussions and followed a true agile approach throughout which was satisfying and enjoyable.”
Suresh also had the critical role of ensuring all the tools were working properly on the day and performing the demo to the judges. During the demo, the team showed their working solution and involved the judges in the approval stages. What particularly impressed the judges was that their entry was fully working, the pipeline had addressed all stages of a change including Governance, and their presentation articulated the business value effectively.
The team were announced winners of the DevOps Hackathon and the demo was so well-received that future presentations to other departments and boards have been requested in the next few months.
“Overall this was a great experience for me. I gained lots of skills – technical as well as presentation and team working / co-ordination experience. I was thrilled to be part of the winning team.”
— Suresh Kotha
Thanks to the NatWest Group management team who gave Suresh this opportunity and supported him throughout. Suresh is looking forward to future hackathons and another opportunity to stretch his techie muscles!
We care about Innovation
Innovation focusing on business value is a cornerstone of our culture at Sandhata. We understand that the only way businesses are able to remain competitive in this fast-changing world of self-service and challenger startups is by creating focused solutions tailored to customer needs with no waste. We pride ourselves on being able to offer the best consultants who have many years’ experience in the field and are able to provide these ideas and skills for our clients.
Find out More
To discover more about how Sandhata can help you achieve your DevOps goals and real business impact, take a look at our DevOps services or read some of our customer stories.
Bronwyn Davies
Latest posts by Bronwyn Davies (see all)
- Winner! Unicom Most Innovative Project 2023 - 27th February 2023
- Sandhata Gini – Our internal chatbot - 1st February 2023
- Goodbye 2022 - 19th December 2022