So what is Do What You Want Day / DWYWD?

Do What You Want Day is a full day where we drop your normal work and spend the day on things that matter to us. Markit On Demand hosts this day every quarter and it’s an opportunity to work on projects that will help our teams grow, be more efficient, learn something new, or build community in the office.

It can be a project from scratch that we’ve thought about or something we started but just haven’t found time to work on. Projects in the past have varied from ‘Strategy Alerts’— a way to set up and test market alerts, to ‘Check Mate’, a tool that verifies the success of a web deployment, and to a Virtual Trading Floor that represents the visual activity in a live trading floor.

How we run DWYWD continues to evolve and grow. We continue to improve the IdeaLab, a place where people can expand and carry out ideas for projects for DWYWD, gathering input, comments and where they might need help on a project.

This Fall, the focus was on community. Projects included community outreach at The Boulder Family Learning Center, a 5K run, MOD Meetup — an interface that matches a person’s interests and sets up events, and a tool that improves editable requirements for passwords. All the projects where presented and judged on complexity, overcoming challenges and creativity. There were many excellent projects that people came up with and implemented on DWYWD, the below are just a handful.

This Quarter’s Winners

Award: Speed & Style — In honor of the ability to skate gracefully through a hard problem

Request Jail is a service that captures the state of a request when an error occurs in production and allows us to review and replay it later on our local machines by typing in an ID code. There’s a working prototype at the moment that should soon be available for anyone at Markit On Demand to use.

Award: It’s a  ! — In honor of the creativity it takes to make something totally new

We design and develop around huge, ever-changing data sets all the time but we rarely turn that lens on the data we ourselves generate. As an exercise in surfacing the beauty in that kind of data, we looked at the output of our Image Engineering team. This group’s services provide millions of dynamic charts every day; capturing just a couple of minutes’ worth gave us a folder of over 23,000 images to work with. While filtering and rectifying the data, doing some sketching on paper and in code, and testing those ideas, we worked toward a balance of chaos and order: a visualization which could tell a story—we deliver lots of charts—while leaving room for discovery; something that could be read differently at multiple levels. The final result was a 102”x42” poster and a Web-based zoom/pan exploration tool. It’s intended to illustrate and appreciate the tremendous work of our engineers.

Award: A Little Bit of Kindling — A project that is a small start toward something big

Here at MOD, working for international clients is a pretty normal thing. As a developer, I have noticed that some of my day to day tasks were to manage translations for specific projects. The traditional process was something that I found to be tedious and not forward thinking and I figured all parties involved should benefit for a more streamlined approach to this grey area of content. For this fall’s DWYWD, I started to build a translation tool/manager that will become so straightforward and transparent that I’m hoping that this is something that the client (or a single thorough employee) can do.

Golden Years? Yes, with the products we produce we need to come to the realization that the majority of our content (not just translatable) should be a part of a centralized system that we could all point to with little to no effort. With this way of thinking, we can tap into a whole different angle of metrics and determine how influential this process is and break it down to its true value. It’s easy to see that something like this will catch on and our current process is going to become something of the past.

Award: Leading the Way — In honor of guiding people in a new and great direction

The Windows 8 Open F2 App is a proof of concept that shows how flexible the Open F2 platform is and how exciting Windows 8 is to all types of developers. As developers, one of our biggest challenges is keeping up with changing trends, new technology, and new platforms. Windows 8 App development is a new paradigm, but uses all the technology we know and love today—this makes the platform an exciting one to develop on. You can build fully deployed applications using web code and still have access to all the device specific behaviors, events, and information. Windows 8 App development is a logical offering for Markit On Demand, given our expertise, and with Open F2 just being released to the public we wanted to show just how quick and easy we could make an App using our own tools. Looking to the future the Windows 8 market share will be huge, and we hope to offer our clients their own Windows 8 Apps; they're able to deliver a more integrated experience than the web. With Open F2, developers from all backgrounds can develop modules for F2 and a Windows 8 App that houses an F2 container can load those modules without issue. This essentially allows a developer who knows nothing about Windows 8 to develop a rich, integrated application using the flexibility of F2.

Conclusion

DWYWD is a great way to inspire and encourage everyone to take part in projects they may not work on day to day. It encourages new tools and methods, innovation and a little perspiration but can also carry through our everyday projects. The creations and concepts from DWYWD strengthens our culture and our process, reinforcing our capabilities and collaboration with each other. We look forward to the next DWYWD and what new ideas it will bring.

• Tags:
• Innovation
• DWYWD