If you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you may have heard mention of our Developer Challenges. This year, however, Dan Shahin, Manager of our Expert Services team asked the question, “What would happen if we broadened the scope? What if we set aside a day for CodeScientists to unleash their creativity to solve the problems they see?”

And after some conversations with the executive team, we did just that — our developer challenges evolved to the first official CodeScience Challenge Day.

From Then to Now

Our developer challenges started around 6 or 7 years ago with the idea of expanding our skillsets as new technologies and new problems arose. It was a fun and productive way to build something around a specific problem (e.g., calculating the standard deviation on a large data set or gamifying a to-do list).

As CodeScience grew, the developer challenge needed to grow. Our Expert Services team focuses in on smaller, more experimental projects, which function with smaller teams to delight and exceed client expectations. That same spirit drove Dan to question how more of the CodeScience family could get involved with these challenges and as he put it,

“Unleash the power of autonomy and give the really smart people who work here the chance to be creative without telling them what to do.”

CodeScience Challenge Day

Through working with our executive team, Dan crafted the CodeScience Challenge Day. Where once the challenge was specific, the CodeScience Challenge Day was broad — there were two ways a project could qualify — something a little more familiar: Build a Lightning component (using DX optional) and something a little different: Build something useful and/or interesting and/or beautiful.

Entrants could win in the following categories:

  • Most useful
  • Most fun/interesting
  • Most beautiful
  • Best solo entry
  • Best group entry

Each submission had to be distilled down to a two-minute video and submitted to an internal Slack channel.

The Winners

Most Useful

Bonus Planner

Team Members: JT Lovell, Bobby Tamburrino, Ashley Frasier, and Van Le

At CodeScience, one of the awesome aspects of working here is that you receive a bonus twice a year. One facet contributing to your bonus is measuring your utilization. This team put together a tool that works with our timecard system to track your utilization based on days left in the bonus cycle and how much vacation time you are taking to see which tier of bonus you are tracking to. This gives CodeScientists an easy way to understand where they are at a glance.

Most Fun/Interesting and Best Group Entry

Red Panda

Team Members: Ron Kiker, Steve Swiger, and Bryan Friend

The Red Panda project took home two awards this year. They built an ISV connector app to allow someone to track usage within their application. Pre-built functionality includes heat map tracking, single user tracking, and identifying upgrade candidates, which leverages algorithms to determine which companies may be a good candidate for an upgrade based on specific behavior.

Most Beautiful

Automation Reports

Team Member: Pat Meeker

We have an awesome team dedicated to automating the testing process for applications to uncover bugs and ultimately strengthen the quality of the application. Pat Meeker, Quality Engineer, developed a new reporting generator to track the results of the automation testing in place. This will allow clients to see the results of the automation testing in a measurable way and understand the impacts on their application.

Best Solo Entry

Einstein X-mas

Team Member: John Robison

John Robison, one of our Salesforce Engineers, embraced the holiday spirit for his entry. Leveraging Einstein, it gauges the sentiment of comments submitted to a Service Cloud case and changes the color of his tree accordingly — green being positive; yellow, neutral; and red, negative. Our judges found this to be a great practical application of the Einstein platform.

Many other amazing entries were also submitted. These projects will help both CodeScience and our customers. We are already looking forward to next year’s Challenge Day and seeing what new things our team will create.


Are you interested in joining a company that embraces innovation and likes to solve the hard problems? We are hiring; check out our careers page here!