Shipwrecked and learning together
04 | 2024 Sanna Valkeejärvi & Aki Väliaho, Senior Fullstack Developer
How do Kipinä's experienced experts take care of learning new things? By working together and having fun together with programming and gaming. "The most important part of the day was being in a group and seeing what level of programming skills we all have. It was a real validation of the hard skills of Kipinä."
It is common for Kipinä's people to take a day away from their normal working context and projects, to learn from each other and gain a new perspective on teamwork and problem solving. In March, the gang got together for a full day to play a game of shipwreck. However, this Battleship day was somewhat different from what you might imagine from a game night.
The all-day tournament first gave each pair of workers four hours to come up with a working algorithm / artificial intelligence to handle playing and beating the others. For the next four hours, each algorithm played against the others. At the end of the day, the winners were known.
The game platform for the day was created by a team of four people at Kipinä. One of these coders is Aki Väliaho.
"The architecture of the game consisted of a game engine running on a server and client applications running on players' own devices. Both applications were implemented as Spring Boot 3-based Java applications and integrated into the AWS cloud computing environment as an ECS-based containerised solution.
Game events flowed through the Spring Websocket implementation in real-time between client applications, the server and the admin interface. Operational aspects, such as player creation, took place over an authentication-intensive REST interface, through which the connection to the socket providing the game events was routed. Tournament management and the admin interface for game tracking was implemented in the Svelte framework."
Kipinä experts on the hunt for the perfect algorithm.
Those who coded the game platform did not participate in the game, but acted as observers. At the start of the tournament, players received instructions on how to install their environments and where to program the game intelligence. The basic rules of the game of shipboard betting were also reviewed to refresh their memory.
After four hours of rigorous algorithm development, the actual tournament was underway. At this point, there was nothing more to do, the developers had no control over how their algorithm worked during the game.
The algorithms of each pair played against each other, while the whole team of developers watched the game on the big screen, tracking mistakes and successes. No one had a perfect crushing algorithm, but a winner was found.
The joy of learning and being together
In addition to having a great time together all day, coding, playing and sauna, the experts learned from each other. Working as a team also creates the best value for customers, which is why it is practised in real-life situations.
Aki describes the day as follows, "We all had a hell of a good time all day. I think everyone learned a lot during the day. The most important thing was that we were doing things as a group and seeing what level of programming skills we all have. It was a real validation of the hard skills of Kipinä."
While watching the game, the discussion was heated and after the game, a review was made of all the algorithms created and the code behind them. Gently laughing at the expense of others and also giving respect.
The day produced many lessons and insights.
Training to work together in a concrete way
Communication in the middle of coding
Coding as a team is not often a mainstream practice in expert work, although Kipinä does a lot of work together. Social learning was strong again in this collaborative event.
Going through all the achievements, each in turn having to explain why they had come to their own conclusions with their partner
Dynamic practice rounds before the start of the game
What was impressive is that all the teams managed to create an AI/algorithm in a short time that didn't get stuck during the four-hour game. This is a testament to the kind of professionals we have at Kipinä.
Some continuation of such development days is in the offing. So many good lessons and good vibes were gained from the day. Everyone who attended was very enthusiastic about the day, this day there were 12 people present, hopefully more will be competing against each other on the next.