C⁴: Our first in-person company event

2021 was a year of important milestones for Opslock- so what better way to celebrate this than by celebrating the individuals who made this possible. Introducing Opslock’s first, but definitely not the last, annual Compulsory Corporate Culture Celebration, or C^4 for short 😉

What is the Compulsory Corporate Culture Celebration?

For starters, it is an opportunity for everyone in the team to meet and get to know each other outside of Zoom boxes. After over a year of the pandemic, it was great to bring everyone together (even those who live out of town) in a long-overdue reunion.

It’s also the first big company event we have ever done, and something that we expect to become a tradition. Not only because it’s an excuse to bond with your colleagues, but it’s also the perfect time to see what happens when you put all of the great minds that make up Opslock together in one room.  

How did the Compulsory Corporate Culture Celebration go down?

The event was a 3-day extravaganza filled with dinner and drinks at local restaurants; impressive catering organized by our very own @CravingCurator; customized merch and goodies; as well as the first company hackathon!

Overall, they were 3 fun-packed and unforgettable days spent in great company. 

Breaking down Opslock’s first-ever Hackathon?

We thought a Hackathon would be a fun and creative activity where everyone, even those who aren’t engineers, could get involved showcasing their knowledge, strengths, and unique skillsets. So, how did we do it?

Organized by our CTO Bryan & Head of Product Scott they explained that during our hackathon:

• We would each be divided into 3 teams, where we would be equally split by our roles and skillsets.
• Each team would be responsible for designing and building a feature for our product.
• They would have 24 hours to do so before presenting to a committee, where their feature would be judged by the following criteria: Business Value, Coolness, Polish, Innovation & Realistic Capabilities. 

Over the course of the next couple of days, all 3 teams carried out an ideation phase, each selecting their own ambitious idea to execute & using their individual expertise to build a complete product. The result? 3 creative and impressive game-changing features were presented at the end of the event. 

It was an extremely rewarding experience to see how everyone’s strengths came out to compliment each other during this event. Especially considering that most people hadn’t even met in person before. The hackathon proved to also be an opportunity for everyone to get a ‘behind the scenes’ look into what each person does  – allowing all of us to learn from each other, bond together, and also gain a newfound appreciation for our colleagues and the work that they do. 

A special acknowledgment to Opslock’s Special Forces… 

We want to dedicate a small segment of this article to Bjorn Lu, our colleague in Malaysia who due to the pandemic couldn’t be at the C^4 event with us. However, his presence was very much felt and he did manage to not only participate in the hackathon….but to produce an impressive feature that would have a tremendous impact on our engineering team as a one-person army.

One of our biggest failures was not documenting all the times your teammates praised you, Bjorn!

C^4 after-hours

When we weren’t hacking, we were enjoying each other’s company:

At the office 

At an ice-breaker apero at Beau Temps

At the Opslock office rooftop

At the company dinner at Boxermans

Overall the Compulsory Corporate Culture Celebration was a fun event, that brought everyone closer and we will be doing it again 🙂