From Wikipedia: “A hackathon… is a sprint-like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development… collaborate intensively on software projects. Some hackathons are intended simply for educational or social purposes, although in many cases the goal is to create usable software.”
While the above definition of Hackathon is correct, it is generic. The explicit purpose of the Paradigm Hackathon was to explore innovative concepts and ideas that could make their way into Paradigm commercial software and deliver significant new levels of productivity to our customers. The Hackathon is set up to free R&D teams from the constraints placed by roadmaps, processes, internal standards and methods, and allow them to run free in an environment of “organized chaos”.
The goal of the Paradigm Hackathon was to give all members of the Product and R&D teams an opportunity to flesh out new ideas that they might be passionate about but did not have time to work on during their daily schedule. As a guideline, the teams were informed of areas of strategic interest to Paradigm. These covered a wide range of categories, including improving software performance, usability and supportability, cross-domain integration, application of new science in each domain, software build and engineering innovations, cloud adoption, native cloud applications, and the application of machine learning to solve G&G problems.