Back in April 2021, we wanted to find a way to encourage our team to step away from feature work, technical debt, and other day-to-day tasks to focus on technical experimentation, active learning opportunities, and proof of concept work. With this we created ON Week, an opportunity to get more engaged with fellow team members to work and innovate together in the form of a team all-hands. Part hackathon, part learning & development, ON Week isn’t a break but rather a time to pursue questions that may not fit in a normal development cycle.

This talk will cover insights learned over the past three years, from how it originated to how it’s evolved. We’ll go over how we plan for ON Week, organizing projects & team members, and how to add some flair to keep your team excited. There will also be a focus on the “why” of ON Weeks and how we’ve continued to prioritize and champion this time for our team since its inception. Finally, as a fully distributed team, we’ll discuss ways of keeping teams on track even when located halfway across the world from each other!

Principal Data Engineer & Ambassador of Fun

Jessica is a Principal Data Engineer on the Threat Data Services team at Elastic, where she focuses on building scalable infrastructure supporting