Recently we held our Q1 Innovation Week, culminating in presentations and voting on the innovation projects created by our engineering staff.

Volt Active Data engineering is a Agile scrum organization, with two week sprints, and product releases every other sprint. Innovation week occurs one week every quarter. During this week engineers work on a self-directed project, such as exploring a new technology, learning about technology (such as R or Docker), or just something technological of interest. At the end of this week, engineers present their project to the whole company, including marketing, sales, and the executive team. At the end of the session, the entire company votes on which project and presentation they thought was the best, with the winner receiving an iPad or cash equivalent. This creates an interesting presentation environment, because people may vote on what is the most technologically impressive, or the most marketable project, amongst other things.

Innovation Week work is not isolated from our product. Many projects seek to improve Volt Active Data in some way, and some projects make their way into production. For example, one Innovation Week project in the past was work on user-defined functions, which is being fully developed and added into product. So while engineers may be working on something esoteric or in an entirely new space for us, if it’s good enough, it might just end up as a part of Volt Active Data.

Congratulations to our winners this time around, Seeta Somagani, Dr. Yiqun (Ethan) Zhang, and Min Xiao for their entry, “Machine Learning in Real Time”!

Learn more about joining our engineering team by visiting our careers page, and Follow us on Instagram to see more #LifeAtVolt Active Data.