For the Love of Hackathons: Creative Cross-team Innovation at Demandbase

Those who know me have likely experienced my happily telling tales of how, in my journey of life, I’ve designed community programs with and for engineers and scientists. Incredible memories exist from those days, especially from the times when I organized hackathons. Building them is exciting for me, as hackathons are about contribution and collaboration—two essential elements of any healthy, thriving community.

When I heard Demandbase was hosting its own Hackathon, I was (not surprisingly) curious to find out more about who would participate and what they would be working on. The hackathon, as I learned, spanned three days which gave our product, engineering and data science teams the time and conditions to come together to innovate.

Ultimately, I went on a mission to chat with those who participated in the event, to learn more about their skill sets, what they learned, and what technologies were the focus of their innovation. I chatted with a few awesome members of our data science and engineering teams and I’d like to share the conversations with you. 

Please join me in learning more about the Demandbase Science and Engineering teams by checking out the brief interviews below. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about the Demandbase team, what we’re working on and what it’s like to work here! Thanks for checking out my blog! 

Erin Oshinsky, Data Scientist

Erin came to Demandbase with a degree in statistics and a background as a data analyst. Chatting with her about her journey to becoming a Data Scientist and what the experience is like for her here at Demandbase was awesome. She was excited to have the opportunity to collaborate with the engineers and to be supported in taking the time to learn and innovate with others in Demandbase Science and Engineering teams. 

Louie Lu, Sr. Software Engineer

Louis came to Demandbase from Twitter Engineering. He now works on the Analytics team at Demandbase, helping build the core functionality of the Demandbase One. Here he shares a bit about what he works on at Demandbase and his experience at the hackathon as a learning opportunity around technologies such as AI and ChatGPT, and building a Python server. Louis is passionate about the culture here and especially loves our Learning Days. Feel free to see what projects he’s worked on and connect with him on LinkedIn.

Joshua Cason, Sr. Software Engineer

Josh’s education is in Computational Linguistics and Computer Science. He has a strong background in research and working in AI, including working on Watson at IBM. Here, Josh shares his experience and details about what we’re up to with AI, ML, data science and engineering using Scala, here at Demandbase.