February 3rd, 2017 by Adam Sandman
As part of our drive to give back to the local DC Tech Community, Inflectra is going to be sponsoring local Hackathons and Testoramas in the DC area in the coming year. Keep an eye out for news on our local meet-ups and events. In addition we have user summits in Europe during the month of March, and are planning on similar events in North America later this year.
What is a Hackathon?
A hackathon is a collaborative event where teams of developers, designers, and UX specialist will compete to build awesome new products and ideas in a social setting. Large scale hackathons can last several days in a continuous sleepless format with attendees subsisting of pizza and energy drinks. We are looking to create smaller-scale coding events that would last 4-6 hours in the evening and can therefore be accessible to coders and technologists who have day jobs and families! We believe that there is untapped talent and energy in the DC tech community that can be unleashed in these events.
Inflectra will be partnering with local collaborative workspaces and technology firms to bring these mini-hackathons to different parts of the city to nurture our local tech talent.
What is a Testorama?
With our heritage in testing and previous sponsorships of testathons in Europe, Inflectra will be also working to help nurture the local testing community. A testorama is similar to a mini-hackathon, except instead of building new products, the competition is to find bugs and issues.
We will be looking to partner with local startups to test their crowd-test applications in a fun, communal settings. Testers are allowed to use any testing method they feel will find bugs, and they will have the full suite of Inflectra products at their disposal.
Where Will They Be Held?
We are still working out the details, but most likely the events will be held in local shared office environments such as 1776 and WeWork as well as in our own headquarters building in Silver Spring, MD. We may also partner with companies in Northern Virginia so that technologists in Arlington and Alexandria, VA don't feel left out.
How Do I Get More Information?
We will be announcing the events on multiple channels - Meetup.com, our Facebook page, and our Twitter channel. We will be publishing photographs and videos via our Instagram account as well.