Last week at Scandio, ShipIt Days, our in-house innovation days, took place for the sixth time. This year, the focus was on many projects in the Cloud, Mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) areas, and accordingly many wires, screws and soldering irons lay on the desks. The cloud topic was very well appreciated by the teams and we were very pleased that our partner Amazon Web Services (AWS) supported this by providing services.

In the lead-up to the event, the “secret” slack channels were already thrilling, as the ShipIt teams were forming dynamically. This year 13 teams started their projects on Thursday. The team size varied between one and six team members. As we currently have three locations, it was possible to work in all offices, although Berlin decided to visit us in Munich.

After 24 hours of power coding, crafts and design work, the presentations began on Friday afternoon. These are very short with five minutes, but play a not insignificant role in the final evaluation. In addition to the final presentation, the categories Innovation, Competence and Benefit (meaning the benefit for Scandio) were included in the overall evaluation.

All projects were extremely exciting and successful. The great thing about the ShipIt Days is that we can generate real added value for ourselves and our customers. Now to the winners:

Winner in the category: Presentation

Sip It from Alina, Carla, Joschi, Maxi and Thomas

Somehow we always end up with beer - whether it’s the “Friday beer at four” or the annual pilgrimage to Andechs. Beer is always nearby (of course non-alcoholic ;-)). Now the “Sip It” team has put one more on it. They brewed their own Scandio beer. The team even made a promotional video. Take a look for yourself! Logically, the beer was brought in for presentation by Siri on a robot with 3D-printed holder.

We proudly present: Sip It - The Scandio Beer:

We proudly present: Sip It - The Beer-Robot:

Winner in the category: Competence & Innovation

SoftwAIR from Marius, Martin, Max and Natascha

“SoftwAIR” uses complex sensor technology and a Raspberry Pi to measure CO2, fine dust, humidity and temperature in the Scandio office. So anyone can see at any time how good the air is in the office. With Python- and Go-Development meaningful predictions can be made. That didn’t work out right away, which led to Marius going to bed on Friday when the rest of us came back to Scandio.

This project consists of three components:

  1. Collect sensor data with Python and Go and write it into a time series database
  2. Evaluate sensor data, plot (with Grafana) and create prediction models (with Python and test R, which would have been the better choice)
  3. Also a Slack-Bot, which warns if the air is bad

The result: In future, we will be notified in advance if there is “thick air” in the office. This not only promotes concentration but also health and has led to a clear victory in two categories.

Winner in the category: Benefits

FIS - Future Inside Structure from Christian, Irmi, Sascha and Toni

We love Atlassian Confluence and have been using it as an intranet for almost a decade. We have many little helpers and documentations, a not so bad onboarding procedure and even something like an employee guide. But to find something you needed the “Marauders Map” known from Harry Potter. The team, which consisted of frontend developers and Atlassian consultants, actually managed to collect all the content in one area, rewrite it, unbundle it, and give it a great navigation and layout. Already this week it is the most visited area in our intranet.

Overall winner

ScandioApp from Ansgar, Ben, Martin, Michael, Stefan and Tobias

Scandio App

As is often the case, the overall winner is not one of the above-mentioned teams. The ScandioApp is a mobile application for iOS and Android, developed in React Native, which will become the center for the future Scandianer. With this app you can control our slack based presence/absence service ESTADO and inform all colleagues via Swipe that you are in your home office, at the customer’s or sick or that you will come to the office later. You can also read the internal blog posts (we write about 400 per year) directly in the app. If you plan your next holiday with friends in the evenings, you can also view the remaining holiday or the saved overtime hours with the new ScandioApp. There are still 1000 new ideas. Of course, the team won with the development of this app. If you also want to use the ScandioApp, have a look at our Jobpage.

That’s not all. On place 2 - 5 are still extremely important projects from the areas of Kubernetes with AWS, Ansible and Terraforming, an IoT greenhouse that produces the herbs for the Scandio kitchen and much more. We will report.