by Katie Paige, on October 27, 2016
A few weeks ago, everyone at Arkatechture received a somewhat unusual calendar invitation from Integration Developer Jared Rohrdanz: 
The description of the event was simple: "Take part in the 15 slice challenge at Ricetta's pizza buffet." Within minutes, the event had a nearly 99% participation rate. Note that there was a one hour time limit on this event, and it was strictly enforced! At Arkatechture, we're not unfamiliar with eating challenges. The Chipotle one hour two burrito challenge is a semi-regular activity at Arkatechture, and we down bags of Fresh Pops on the reg. However, pizza was completely uncharted territory!
Before we knew it, the day of the pizza challenge had arrived. We piled into the cars, and headed north to the buffet.
Keeping score of the event was necessary. Knowing the number of slices by person was essential, but we also decided tracking time and type of pizza would be a plus.
Instead of having a score/data keeper, we decided to use Slack! We created a new channel, #pizzachallenge, and while eating, each participating Arkabot would enter their type of pizza. When we got back to the office, we did a quick pull from Slack into our data warehouse (Arkabase) using Alteryx. You can read more about how we integrated Alteryx with Slack here! We then pulled this data from Arkabase, our internal database, and built a viz in Tableau to organize the results of the competition!
Some achievements to note:
- Jared hitting the challenge goal with only 39 minutes elapsed
- 138 total slices consumed, or 11.5 slices per person
- Pesto pizza was by far the most popular flavor, at 26 slices consumed
