Meet Zack Akil, Senior Machine Learning Engineer & Developer Advocate, Google

Zack Akil is a senior machine learning engineer & developer advocate at Google specializing in practical AI. He spends most of his time building experimental Machine Learning applications - often inspired by his many random hobbies - that help and inspire other developers to build with ML in unique and better ways.

In this episode, we discussed how and why Google conducts internal hackathons and what they aim to achieve. We explored why it's particularly beneficial to organize hackathons when groundbreaking new technologies emerge. There are many advantages to quickly setting up hackathons to explore potential uses for these technologies. Building an organization around new technology takes time, so a hackathon is an ideal format to see what happens when you invite everyone to participate and contribute their ideas and development efforts.

Zack has also virtually won every hackathon he has participated in—truly remarkable! In this podcast, he reveals his very concrete winning strategies.

We also discussed development velocity in general and what can be done to increase it.