Martello BLOG : Martello Life

Tips and Tricks for Remote Work

Many companies are making the shift to remote work in order to help stop the spread of COVID-19, including Martello.

“Our employees, themselves working remotely, are helping our customers implement the tools they need to keep their IT infrastructure running smoothly and ensure business continuity”, said John Proctor, President and CEO of Martello.

Remote working is not typical for most of the workforce, so suddenly shifting to a new work situation can be difficult.

We have compiled a list of our top tips and tricks on how to boost productivity at home. Take a look:

1. Think about who you interact with every day at the office, whether it’s for a cup of coffee, a lunch break or just a chat in the hallway. Set up a short video chat to keep connected to those people and remove the feeling of isolation when working at home – Paul Kudzia, Regional Sales Executive
2. Take advantage of being home by cooking yourself a delicious lunch every day. It can be too easy to get caught up with work and forget to eat. Set time aside to make something nutritious from your kitchen – Chris Miller, Product Manager
3. Get dressed as you would for work every day. By having a shower and putting on clothes that you would wear for your workday, you will feel more productive – Andrea Winter, VP People
4. Use time blocking. Pick a task and assign a block of time to focus on it, even if it is just a small block of time. Sometimes spending even 20 or 30 minutes to complete a simpler task will give you some momentum to take on bigger and more complex challenges that will require even more focus – Tracy King, VP Marketing
5. Set up regular meetings with your team. You don’t have proximity to lean on when you’re working on projects together, so it’s important to establish and keep open your lines of communication for effective remote work – John Proctor, President and CEO
6. Keep a morning routine. You don’t usually go from your bed directly into the office. Take the time from when you’d be commuting to have breakfast, a cup of coffee, read the news and other ways to start the day to ease into your work day – Rob Doucette, VP Product Management
7. Make sure you take regular breaks from your desk. Get up and move around, or even move to a different area of the house so you can stand, like the kitchen island – Justin Boerrigter, Technical Sales Manager
8. Get as much natural light as possible. Opening the curtains can make a huge difference in your day – Sandra Holland, Marketing Communications Specialist
9. Take time to exercise. Working from home can have you sitting down a lot, to block some time in your calendar to get the blood flowing and maintain a healthy lifestyle – Pardeep Koonar, Director of Alliances

As we all navigate this new world of work, we are sure that there will be plenty of tips and tricks to share. Follow us and share yours!

Breaking the Stereotypes: Women in Technology

Students Challenged in Murder Mystery Hackathon

What did you do this weekend?

While you were getting together with friends or family for dinner, doing grocery shopping and cleaning your house, students at Carleton University were hard at work solving a Martello mystery during the cuHacking event.

Given 24 hours to build a visualization tool based on a dataset, a large number of first year students took on Martello’s challenge for a chance to take home some great prizes.

The Challenge:

A forensic department has approached the teams of students to create a tool that displays the hotel data from keycards, WiFi connections and motion signals. Students were to clearly measure, analyze and correlate the association of events and activities of the 8-12 hours before the murder happened in the hotel. Tracing where each of the 12 suspects were in the hotel and their interactions with the victim would help authorities know who to bring in for further interviews.

Hack-a-thon Success:

This year’s hackathon had more than 600 attendees, which exceeded the organizers expectations. This was the 4th year Martello has had a presence at cuHacking, and we had our best turn-out yet!

Held at Richcraft Hall, this was the first year a mobile app was used to run the event. This kept things running smoothly, made registration take less time and even included food tickets. Not worrying about logistics planning allowed students to focus on the challenge at hand.

Martello Chief Technology Officer, Doug Bellinger, gave the opening speech at cuHacking, engaging students in the role Martello plays in the future of technology.

As part of hacking challenge, Martello gave away prizes included a DJI drone, GIGABYTE graphics card, Bose headset and Nintendo Switch Lite. With 5 Martello judges at the helm, they evaluated the presentation, easy of use, quality of code, the solution and of course, a bonus.

The cuHacking was great to not only show students what Martello was all about and challenge them with a real-world scenerio, it was a great team-building event for us too!

With 10 Martello mentors on hand for both days, we were able to bond as a team and help students troubleshoot issues, as well as answer questions.

Read more about Martello’s strong co-op culture in our blog.

The Results:

On Saturday, Software Developer Co-op Aarthi Ganesh presented how to design your own Baby Yoda avatar. Later in the afternoon, Director of R&D, Eugene Lee gave insight to his perspective on hiring at a tech company.

Once the hackathon time had elapsed, 35 teams submitted a challenge to the judges. This was the highest number of submissions of all the companies participating in the event!

Team Crime Scene Investigator consisting of:  Li Wang, Jiujiu Duan, Songmi Wu, Wiwei Zhang, Simon Gu were marked as the winner of the event, taking home the grand prize.

Runner up was Team Hacked 2 Death.

Overall, we had a great time at cuHacking this year! It was great to meet all the participants and we were blown away by some of the innovative submissions by the teams.

Do you want to join the Martello team? Apply as a Software Developer Summer Student Deadline for applications is January 26.