No-one is smarter than all of us.
Application Development is a team sport. We succeed and fail as teams of product owners, developers, testers and writers.
I spend at least 8 hours a day and 5 days a week working in close collaboration with my team so it's a good job we all like each other. We meet every morning in our Daily Standup, make sure none of us are stuck on our tasks and then work together to build features.
This kind of close collaboration results in an amazing experience when the team is working well. Information flows from member to member, feedback cycles are reduced - we get guidance on features from our customers, reports of bugs from our testers and progress updates from the team. In a team that is working well together you can just walk into their area and feel the energy and momentum that the team has. Work begins to flow.
In the UK ServiceNow Application Development office we are a tight bunch. We lunch together, meet in the mornings at various rail stations and converge into the office in a big, noisy boisterous crowd.
We build team spirit through shared experience.
Building team spirit at the Hackathon
Anyway.. I wanted to talk about the CreateNow Custom Application Hackathon that is happening in Paris, Mainz and London next month.
In the CreateNow contest we are going to see small teams working closely together to build some amazing examples of custom applications on the ServiceNow platform.
We want the teams to have that experience of working together and to walk away feeling that they succeeded. The shared experience of writing solutions under pressure is something we want our contestants to take back to their own organisations.
To help with this every contestant will receive a CreateNow polo shirt at the event.
This is going to be a really exclusive thing to have. We only ordered just enough for the teams participating in the Hackathon - On the front underneath the now forum logo it says "Paris | Mainz | London | Oct 2013". You can only get one of these polo shirts by competing in the CreateNow contest.
You can walk into the next ServiceNow User Group in your city wearing this polo shirt and know you were part of that small group of developers that were there on the day.
Register now for the CreateNow Custom Application Hackathon
If you have any questions please leave a comment here or in the CreateNow Google+ community.
And don't forget that we'll be tweeting and posting pictures and video from the competition on the day.
Enter your team for the CreateNow Custom Application Hackathon today!
