TechWeek 2023 brings together LBR’s product and tech teams
LBR’s London office was bustling with excitement last week as we hosted TechWeek ’23. Our largely remote or hybrid teams of 60+ developers, product managers, data scientists, UX and QA professionals came together for a few days of learning and hacking. The team, boosted by the recent acquisition of MBL Seminars, travelled in from across the UK, Bulgaria and the US, with the India team dialling in.
We ran several sessions to help the teams get to know each other better, as well to gain all-important context on clients and markets from others in the business, including LBR’s growing team of ex-lawyers.
The centrepiece of the week was a hack day, which involved small teams working together to tackle one of three business and technology problems.
Tagging UI
The Lexology Labs team has recently overhauled the automated taggers used to apply LBR’s taxonomy to our content sets, including the 500 articles added each day to Lexology. The challenge for teams was to improve the admin for content specialists whose job it is to supervise the tagging as well as labelling a subset to feed into the training loop. Humans can’t hold a huge ontology in their heads, so the teams came up with innovative ways of surfacing and gamifying the interface.
Vector database
This challenge started with what felt like a maths lesson but soon jumped to the practical question of where else LBR could apply vector database search. With all of LBR’s data and content in one central place, it felt like the possibilities were endless.
Devops
Improvement was the name of the game in the DevOps stream. Finding new and innovative ways to streamline the process of deploying to LBR’s Cloud infrastructure in any way they saw fit, be it through removing friction from developer processes or changing the deployment process entirely. In a live session the day before, a mini-Kubernetes cluster was built using Raspberry Pis and was made available for the teams to deploy apps from any of the streams to it.
The teams headed home exhausted and fired up with ideas for what’s next.
About LBR
LBR is a technology-enabled information services business powering the global professional services sector with intelligence, analytics and performance data. By applying technology to extract enhanced value from quality content, achieving commercial excellence, and empowering our teams, we deliver proprietary, time-sensitive data, insight, expert research, and sophisticated tools and networking. With an international team of over 500 experienced professionals, LBR has a proven track record of informing, engaging and connecting our clients.
