My favorite Box value is “Bring your______ self to work, every day,” where Boxers can fill in that blank to include whatever they want. To me, this means I can be myself at work and my coworkers will celebrate whoever that person is. I don’t have to try to fit in just to belong or pretend I’m someone else. I can be an engineer AND a runner AND a sweets lover AND a baker and best of all, I can share all of these things with my coworkers. At Box, we’re also encouraged to make our epic ideas a reality. To that end, three years ago, a coworker and I decided that we wanted to celebrate Pi Day in style. I love baking pie, I love eating pie, I love having fun with my coworkers and I love nerdy things like pi day. We quickly decided that there was clearly no better way to celebrate pi day than to have an engineering pi(e) baking contest. This is now the fourth year in a row that I’ve organized our pi(e) day contest. Each year, bakers come out of the woodwork and we typically have 10-15 pies made by everyone from first time bakers to experienced pie makers. In the past we’ve had creative concoctions, such as Maple Bacon pie, chicken wing dip pie, s’mores pie and of course, apple pie. The contest and sampling is held on 3/14 at 1:59 (obviously) and we allow everyone to taste and vote on a crowd favorite. Most of engineering stops by to view, sample and talk about pie.

One pi(e) had to take the cake

This year was no exception. We had 16 pies baked by 16 people and all of them were amazing. Despite that, winners still must rise to the top. Our winning pies this year included an amazing Bacon Maple Toffee pie made by Ryan winning crowd favorite. We had the nine-year-old daughter of Heidi, one of Engineering directors (with some help from Heidi) win the newbie category with her Very Berry pie. Because not everything can be sweet all the time, Sumedha won our savory category with her Samosa pie. To celebrate the true bakers who believe only a true traditional homemade crust is acceptable on their pie, I won the crust category with my Manju (azuki bean) pie. To encourage creativity, we have a most creative (but still tastes good) category. This year it didn’t disappoint with Alisa’s Too Many Oreos pie. And finally, our illustrious judges, who (probably) weren’t bribed, picked Raspberry Pi in the Sky, a joint effort by Helen and Jackie as the overall winner.

Thanks to everyone who made pies and to our amazing judges, Benji, Prachi and Sid! While this is one of my favorite events, I couldn’t make it happen without everyone else bringing their baker self and pie-eating self to work.