Target’s CodeRED Hack – a daylong hackathon open to all Target team members to work on projects to introduce, improve or enhance products or services used by Target – is always an energizing day, but the most recent event was special.

Around August 2017, the engineering tools team at Target was tasked to rewrite and rearchitect a few team chatbots that helped complete certain administrative and operational tasks. These bots were written using several different languages and frameworks that often got confusing and difficult to manage. For example, one of our bots was written in Hubot coffescript, which called a Node script, which triggered a Jenkins job. Another bot was written in Golang, which made calls to various APIs for gathering and relaying information. And another bot was written in Ruby using the Rubotnik framework to do various admin tasks.

Once in a while, there comes along an initiative that really has the potential to make an impact and change the future leadership makeup of your organization. A program that is different than any other before it. Target’s Engineering Manager Immersion Program (eMIP) is one such program.