Hack Week 3 starts today so it is now my pleasure to give you a short introduction what Hack Week is and what will happen at Zalando Technology in the next days.

The idea

If I have to summarize Hack Week in one sentence, I’d say it is similar to the Google Friday but here we have it for an entire week. The topics range from new digital shopping experiences like virtual reality dress rooms, trying on clothes digitally, robots, delivery by drones, and 3D-printing or experimenting with new technologies. The topics are all quite interesting but most importantly is that it's a week in the spirit of innovation, freedom and motivation that spreads over all Zalando tech facilities.

The process

Three weeks before every Hack Week the ideaboard is opened and pitching begins. This is a place where everyone can share their concepts or find projects that they would like to support. In these three weeks we additionally hold pitch sessions where everyone can promote their projects to find other people to join their projects.

Then during the week all regular work stops and everybody starts hacking, programmers, designers, and product managers all come together in the name of technology. It's not all work though with various social activities like office mini-golf and table soccer tournaments running in parallel.

Cream of the crop is the week’s final presentation (and party) where every team presents their hacks. Every three minutes a new project comes leaving you speechless. At the end the best teams get awards in different categories like best hardware project, most innovative project, best teamwork and many more.

So that was a short introduction, now I have to join my team as well. ;-)

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