What robot spiders have to do with our work

What do robot spiders, MMPORGs and pancake machines have in common? Clearly, we dealt with all of these topics at our internal hackathon – the Woodhack. Once a year, our colleagues have the opportunity to spend two days focusing on what excites them outside of work. For this, we go to the countryside together, rent a cute hotel and tinker with our projects day and night. At the end, a winning project is chosen.

This year, most of the participants came from our software engineering department, but there were also a few colleagues from HR and marketing. They don’t know how to code, but they got involved in the projects in other ways.

Project #2 The MMPORG

For all non-gamers: An MMORPG is a “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game”. Many players explore a game world at the same time and experience adventures together, in which they fight monsters and other enemies. Over time, they gain experience and develop their game characters. And that’s what we wanted to develop within two days! Our main concern was the communication between the server and the client, which we wanted to establish with the help of gRPC. We quickly realized that we had taken on too much and were able to present a working map at the end. Characters and game mechanics will follow next year!

Our conclusion? Although we only slept a little and still didn’t finish, the Woodhack is always a great opportunity to work on passion projects and exchange ideas with avengers from other teams and disciplines. We are already looking forward to next year!