When the Snowflake development team was strangely silent on Friday 6th July it could only be for one reason – and we’re not talking about the Higgs Boson announcement. It was ShipIt Day. Instead of the usual daily collaboration and discussion amongst the developers they were all intently working on new product features of their own devising in an attempt to win the trophy, the glory, and the top prize that comes with building the coolest new gadget for our products.

If you haven’t come across them before, the idea of a ShipIt day is that the development team have a day to show off their creativity by building any new product feature they choose. There is a prize for the best ShipIt day idea but the catch is that to win they only have a single day to build it. At the start of the day we pitch our individual ideas to the rest of the team, and by the end of the day we have to demo a fully working implementation in the judging session. It’s something we’ve adopted from the guys over at Atlassian.

This time we introduced a new twist on the original formula – we had not one but two prizes to award. One prize was awarded by the Development team but for added competition the Support team also had a prize of their own for best Customer Experience new feature. And so it was that the GO Loader user interface became the battleground for the Support team’s votes.

Niha, the reigning ShipIt day champion, won the Support team over with some great productivity tools. The Support team regularly work with large data models, so Niha’s idea of allowing them to quickly expand and collapse the translations in the GO Loader user interface and to edit multiple translations at the same time went down really well. Vera’s controls to allow easy retry of aborted and failed loads were another strong contender, as was Ian’s search and replace for database column names. But it was Niha who came out on top as our ‘Customer Yoda’.

Hardo gave us the final demo of the day and started by showing us a completely empty database. Not a spectacular start I agree, but the Snowflake team literally gasped in amazement as he opened up a web browser, scrolled down to a link to an XML file, and with a single mouse click had GO Loader magically downloading the data, creating tables and loading the data.

Unlike most magicians though, Hardo did have something up his sleeve: a browser plug-in connected to the new workflow automation currently under development for GO Loader and GO Publisher. That conjuring trick earned him the top prize from the dev. team, a retro style “Bigtrak” robot and of course The ShipIt Trophy.

Hardo’s presentation was so cool we just had to create a demo video to share with you. Ian and Hardo sat down to show you how this Google Chrome plugin calls our GO Loader RESTful API and loads OS MasterMap into Oracle with a single right click!

ShipIt is a great opportunity for our developers to really get creative and work on those wish list items that not only strengthen our core product functionality but also really enhance your user experience. And whilst we always have a product road map, it’s definitely worth going ‘off-road’ for a short scenic detour before re-joining the main route again.

Check out our ‘The Best of the Rest’ video to see how 7 cool ShipIt features are already in our next release of GO Loader (coming very soon!).

When the whole office (not just our development team!) is collectively stunned into jaw dropping silence followed by a chorus of “Woah!” during the presentations you know it is completely worthwhile mixing things up for a day.

We can’t wait for our next ShipIt Day and we’re hoping neither can you after seeing all the new features we’ve been able to pack into GO Loader this time around as a result!