At T. Rowe Price, hackathons help with AWS migration

Tapping a new technology can be just as much about helping people be comfortable with it as it is about getting every piece in place.
To help developers get comfortable with AWS, T. Rowe Price has been organizing internal hackathons.
“We are in the beginning stages of migrating our technology portfolio to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. We have been using these hackathons as a way to give our developers an introduction to AWS in a way that is relaxed and fun,” VP of Cloud Operations and Engineering Jeff Snyder said.
 
The third such 24-hour event was held last week on Oct. 27-27 at T. Rowe Price’s offices in Linthicum. The events are geared toward solving a challenge that involves AWS. In the most recent case, Xignites provided access to its market data API, and teams were tasked with building a financial app.
For the first time, T. Rowe Price teamed up with UMBC for the event. The 21 devs from T. Rowe Price and six students intermingled to form a handful of teams. T. Rowe Price also had tech staff onhand, and provided food and prizes.
“T. Rowe Price has a strong relationship with UMBC. We hire many UMBC students for internships and full time positions in technology every year.  We saw this as a way to extend and built upon that relationship,” Snyder said.
The winning team tapped a second Amazon product, as well. The team built a tool that allows uses Alexa to provide info about stock prices and market news. Snyder said it was available via Alexa app or mobile device.