DEV Community: Soluto

How to organize a kick ass company hackathon — Pt.2: Making it memorable

Elay Gliksberg — Sun, 29 Dec 2019 11:32:13 +0000

How to organize a kick-ass company hackathon — Pt.2: Making it memorable

In our last blog post, we (Shir Peri, Developer Relations and Elay Gliksberg, a developer) talked about putting together a winning hackathon-planning team. This time we’ll cover the topic of how to make your hackathon a memorable event.

Say Yes

At our hackathon team’s first meeting, all we did was throw around wild ideas for things we might want to do during the hackathon. We decided on one rule: to say YES to all ideas with no negativity and then we put all these ideas in a shared doc.

We knew that once we’d start working on the actual event, we’ll have so many tasks that all our creative juices will be replaced by checklists and deadlines, so documenting our ideas beforehand was extremely important. This way we had a go-to doc when we needed some fun creative ideas (like sunrise yoga, night time massages, and special equipment), at a time when our frantic minds were filled with logistics…

Eventually, our company hackathon at Soluto, included barely 5% of the ideas from this original brainstorming session, but it helped us get the ball rolling.

Surprise effect

All hackathon participants had a “planned surprise schedule”. This means they had a known, pre-planned schedule, but there were still a lot of surprises along the way (we’ll go into creative ways of making the schedule accessible in the next paragraph). There are a lot of cool, non-expensive, things you can add to a standard hackathon that will make a huge difference to the energy level, and increase the fun meter.

For example:

At 11:00 PM when everyone’s tired and energy is low — we announced a massage session. The extreme joy on people’s faces was priceless.

11:00 pm massage session

We gave a boost of energy with bottles of fresh health juices served in buckets of dry ice for a dramatic effect.

Boost of energy

We decorated the location like a mad scientist laboratory (the hackathon theme was “Mad Science”).

Decorating the location as the hackathon theme

Alcohol shots in test tubes after lunch for fun and better coding 😉.

Giveaways and activities

I admit it, I’m a swag junkie. When I get great swag it makes me happy and gets me excited. Giveaways are an important part of the hackathon experience. There are three basic rules to follow:

Don’t hand out all the presents at once, spread them out over the course of the hackathon.
Surprise them — don’t let participants know when and what is coming.
Make the giveaways and activities fit into the hackathon’s schedule. For example, in the morning we had sunrise yoga so everyone could start the day with a relaxing stretching session.

Here are some examples for giveaways and perks we used:

Starter kits — from toothbrushes, toothpaste and towels, to socks, T-shirts, and sleeping masks for a quick shuteye, we gave participants everything they’d need to make it through the day.
Robes — around bedtime (though no one was going to sleep anytime soon), everyone got a branded Soluto robe, to help them get settled in for the night.

Happy with their new robes

Doughnuts — nothing beats a good sugar rush when you’re working an entire day into the night. These late night treats did the trick.

Doughnuts (!)

Theme

Picking a theme for the hackathon is important. It sets the vibe for the entire event, it gets everyone excited and motivated, and it inspires a mood of creativity. In this last hackathon, our theme was “Mad Science” — we wanted the people to think of crazy projects and this was a way to open up their minds. The theme also sets the subject of the projects, whether it’s things for the office, company, product-related, or global warming.

Some inspirational ideas for themes:

“Around the world” — solving worldwide problems through tech
“Closer to the sun” — a hackathon about global warming
“ 2030” — building your company’s future products

How to apply the theme in the field

Decorations

Imagine walking into the office and the first thing you see is nylon curtain strips, creating a lab-like entrance. You immediately feel like something wild is going to happen. Who wouldn’t get excited?!

The decorations are super important for getting people in the right mood. The entire hackathon team worked on creating, designing, and bringing all the decoration ideas to life. From our experience, the UX team member should be the main lead, but the rest also have to contribute.

From past experience, we realized that it’s best to focus on the main areas of the office (lunch area, presentation hall, and office entrance). Planning and making good decorations is really time-consuming, and the more space you cover the more work you have to do. Focusing on the main areas helps you achieve the ultimate time-to-value effect.

Try to make the decorations playful. We noticed that people were having a lot of fun during the hackathon thanks to the small things they could do around the office. In last year’s hackathon, we used dry ice as part of the decorations — everyone loved it! It creates great effects and participants love to play with it, break it, and watch the smoke and bubbles it makes. Another cool thing we had is a photoshoot wall. We put some accessories and a polaroid camera next to the wall — it was a hit, going strong day and night.

Try to also include edible decorations. Use gummy candy, juice, or other colorful sweets.

Photoshoot wall

Schedule

While organizing the hackathon we ended up with a pretty packed schedule. We had to think of a nice way to share it with the participants, without including the surprises that we wanted to share only 30 minutes ahead of time.

We came up with a simple techie idea. We created a website that served three purposes:

Showed the next event
Showed how much time was left until the presentations
Put everyone in the mood with its theme-related design

This website was on all the screens in the office and we also shared its link so everyone could open it on their computers.

We received super positive feedback on it!

You’re welcome to check out our version of the schedule’s website here: https://github.com/elaygl/hackathon-schedule

Feel free to clone it, edit the schedule, and deploy it in Firebase.

Prizes

One of the biggest challenges when planning a hackathon is getting everybody to work hard. Sometimes a passion for the project or new technology is enough, but for some people, a great motivator is the prizes for the winning team. The prizes should be something that’s greatly desired and valuable. We wanted them to be something fun and techie. So, we decided to offer a range of options, from Airpods to iRobot vacuums, and let the winning participants pick their own prize. People loved it that there were several options and they were really motivated to win the prize.

In the next blog post, we’ll fill you in on how we managed all the tasks (and there were A LOT of them), including some winning tips on what you should pay extra attention to and how to stick to a fixed budget.

’Til next time,

Elay & Shir

How to organize a winning company hackathon - Pt.1: The Team

Shir Peri — Sun, 03 Nov 2019 08:48:53 +0000

In this series of six blog posts, you’ll get a handy guide on how to organize a 24h hackathon for ~100 participants.

We’re Elay Gliksberg, a software developer, and Shir Peri, developer relations, and we recently organized our company’s (Soluto) hackathon together with two other colleagues.

Our hackathon had about 100 participants and we had fun organizing it. We collected a lot of knowledge and we noticed that company hackathons are gaining popularity, so we decided to share our formula for organizing awesome hackathons in a series of six blog posts. This is the first post, hold on to it - it’s going to come in handy!

Building the team

So you work in a company and you want to organize a hackathon, putting together a great team is the first step to making this event a great success.
Following different experiences from past hackathons we’ve organized, we came up with two basic rules of thumb regarding the team structure:

1. Keep the organizing team small. Organizing a hackathon means you need to make hundreds of decisions in a short period of time. If the organizing team is big (more than 4 people), it’s hard to move ahead while keeping everyone happy. We believe 3-4 organizers is the ideal number of people for organizing a hackathon. Naturally, more people will be involved with logistics, design, food, external vendors, etc, but it works best when there’s a core team delegating these tasks.
2. The team should include the needed functions for the event. In our case, the team functions were: developer, UX designer, developer relations, and office admin. The tasks in a hackathon are very broad: setting a scoring system, preparing decorations, ordering food, buying giveaways, and more. When the core team has all the skills needed to make the event happen - organizing the event is easier and more efficient.

As the team is built from people with various roles, each team member takes responsibility for the type of tasks that suit her/him best.

Move fast

There are so many decisions you’ll have to make during the event; make sure you’re not overthinking every one of them. Try to make quick decisions and move forward.
Tip: if you have a conflict on some matter, give the final call to the person responsible for it. For example, our UX designer had the final call over decoration disagreements.
But always remember, everybody is doing everything. Especially right before the event, there’ll be lots of logistics tasks that will require the entire team to come together to make sure everything’s done.

Minimum meetings <> maximum efficiency

We had 10 meetings and 3 logistics sessions with the entire team (4 people). That’s it.

In addition, some tasks required only 2 people. For example, we (software developer and the developer relations) were in charge of the scoring system, creating teams, getting the hardware, etc. The admin and the UX designer also had their own meetings regarding prints, decorations, vendors, and more. This way everybody is in sync and the process of organizing the hackathon is more efficient.

Visibility is the key

To make sure that everyone is in sync, we recommend using a Slack channel and scheduling all-hands meetings.

What’s next?

Now, after you picked the perfect team, the next step is making the hackathon memorable! Stay tuned for our upcoming posts in this hackathon series.

Is your Git repo a hot mess? Ours was too

Elay Gliksberg — Tue, 22 May 2018 12:11:59 +0000

repos all over the place

Remember that time you wanted to have a small get together at your apartment? You invited a few of your friends, bought a few drinks and put on some good music… then your friend Bob invited his roommates, your friend Alice invited her co-workers and all of a sudden it was a full blown party. It was a chaos.

Now think about your Git repo. Similar to the party, when there were only a few developers working on the same repo, everything was in order. But when a bunch of developers started showing up, it got a little out of hand.

At Soluto, we have two main repos with more than 100 developers worldwide making commits everyday. When we first started, everyone could push new code to a single master branch and it soon became a mess. Then we started requiring a PR (pull request) in order to push new code. It worked well for a while, but it wasn’t clear who should review the PR for each part of the code, and some chunks of code were neglected completely.

Code owners to the rescue

Github introduced a new cool feature last year called code owners. Code owners lets you define which team or developer is the owner of each piece of code. It’s super easy to use, and it introduced an efficient method of reviewing changes in a big repo.

How it’s done

All you have to do is define a CODEOWNERS file that uses a pattern with the same rules as .gitignore files. Then, in each PR the owners of the changed parts of the code will be required to approve the PR in order to merge it to the master branch. If you want to learn more about code owners, click here.

Now, you got yourself some organized code with well-reviewed PRs. You and other developers are more committed to the code, get to know it better and are more confident when pushing new code to production.

Taking it to the next level

Code owners changed the way we work and we love it. But, we often noticed that in big PRs — with many changed files — there were multiple owners who were requested to review the PR. It soon became tedious for the owners to track which files they had to review.

Introducing code owners Chrome extension

We developed a simple and useful Chrome extension that allows the code owner to click a button and instantly see only the files he’s the owner of. What’s going on behind the scenes, you may ask? Firstly, it locates the CODEOWNERS file, then identifies the files of which you’re the owner and need to review, filtering out the rest of the changed files. How cool is that?

So, now the code is more organized and clean because of the PRs. The developers know the code better thanks to the code owners feature. And the reviewers are happy to review code in a more efficient way with our awesome extension. 😉

If you want to try out our chrome extension, it’s available for download here.

Feel free to add any issues or PRs on our Github — this will help us out in improving the extension.

Originally published at Soluto Engineering Blog.