Hackathon 2021: Open Source edition

Digital Hackathon in a digital studio

Hackathon has been a part of GoodRequest since 2015, when we started to like it and found out that it really makes sense for the team and the community. Since then, it has held a stable place among our top team activities. It is also one of the three biggest events of our digital studio during the year.

Hackathon is one of the favorite benefits of our .gr family, which allows us to enter the new year beyond the normal scope of work and the work team with a great deal of creativity and enthusiasm. This means in our digital studio that we will postpone for 2 days the design, application development, creation of information systems, meetings and everything that makes up our normal working day. And the solutions that emerge in 48 hours can often improve and simplify processes not only in GoodRequest, but also contribute to the IT community this year. Because this year's Hackathon theme was Open Source!

Have a look how good we were with Hackathon last year!

Our first Online Hackathon!

Given the current situation, we also had to adapt. We didn't want to miss the hackathon in any case, so we decided to organize it online. Team formation went as usual. Everyone could sign up with their own project or join an existing team. The individual projects were created according to whether someone had an idea or wanted to participate in something. You just logged in with a simple form.

This year we lost our common breakfast, but instead, we enjoyed Hackathon from the comfort of home and connected from all over Slovakia, which you can see on this map. :)

Learn more about how to organize an online Hackathon!
 

Open Source and two days full of fun!

We have chosen the Open Source theme for this year. Below this we can imagine for example:

• creating an online course
• troubleshooting StackOverflow
• creating a public template on Confluence / Figma
• creating a plugin for your IDE
• contribution to an existing open-source project
• creating a new open-source project
• creating your own community

In this way, we would like to make this year's theme reflect the needs of the company, but also to give something to the community in this way. And I can tell you that there is a lot to look forward to :)

Our experienced team has a lot behind them and this year's Hackathon was our sixth in a row. ❤️The schedule of our two-day marathon is in the picture below. :)

Priority number 1? Benefit for the IT community!

This year, up to 13 teams managed to form. Almost everyone from programmers to designers to management was involved.

Here you can see what we came up with this year:

1. APIDOC ANNIHILATOR - Project to improve project documentation. This feature will help us accelerate development by 5 to 10%. Of course, everything will be open-source :)
2. React PageBuilder Package - We have been looking for a way for a company to add a static content management tool to a project for a long time. This project should allow us to do that.
3. Automatic string localization tool - Everyone in the company wants to be as efficient as possible and we are looking for ways to do it. With this tool, we will be able to automatically translate strings, which will significantly speed up the time needed to complete the project.
4. iOS Project Template - Setting up a basic project configuration takes a lot of time. That's why we decided to make it easier and create a new iOS Project Template tailored just for us.
5. GoodProcess - The more we grow, the harder it is to handle some processes in the company. Therefore, our CEO Tomáš Lodňan together with Martin Macík decided to map these processes. Surely you can expect an article from us on how to do it and we will also give you some tips on how to do it as best as you can :)
6. Template of PM processes - In the company, some processes are repeated regularly, so we thought that it would probably be good to give it some structure, so we created a template of PM processes that we would like to use in the future.
7. Kotlinzoom library - We wanted to add new functionalities to our library to help us with nested immutable data structures. We will definitely introduce this project to you in more detail soon. :)
8. GooRu (Onboarding bot on Slack) - We have a lot of new colleagues. We are really happy with it! We only have one Katka. And so that we don't forget anything during onboarding, keep the experience and at the same time not overwhelm new team members at once with a lot of information, we create GooRou. A slackbot who can handle all these points.
9. Gamification of the educational process of informatics - Learning can sometimes be really boring, so we asked our selves in the company why not to do it a little better. This project should allow high school students to learn how to program in the funniest way possible.
10. Backend monitoring - defining metrics, finding relevant tools As we want to keep improving, we need to know what's going on. With this project, we would like to define exact metrics and also find some tools that could help us.
11. Figma project template - creation of a model and universal Figma project, thanks to which the form and structure of projects will be uniform across the company. This will help clarity and efficiency in the design team while simplifying the work of programmers.
12. GoodFormatter 2.0 - The GoodFormatter, specific for us, already needed an update, so we said that this is probably the best opportunity. We wanted to optimize it even more and expand the possibilities that would be focused on our Android team.
13. Improving the performance of React applications - Since performance is important to us, in this project we decided to improve React applications as much as possible, which will help us to improve the score in tools such as. Google Page Speed ​​Insights.
     

The projects were undoubtedly great this year, and for sure, we will introduce you more in the coming weeks.

Unfortunately, we couldn't be together this year, but we still tried to capture our premiere online hackathon through a lens.

‍Three winners, no one defeated

Just like last year, we decided to award hackathon participants in three categories. The evaluation of projects was in charge of a team of experienced developers, designers and management, ie members of gr. family.

Voting was organized through Google Meet, immediately after excellent and breathtaking presentations. :)

42 juries took part in the voting and determined the following winners.

The biggest contribution

In the category of the greatest contribution, the winner was the 🥇4-member star Backend team, which focused on the topic of automation of generation of API documentation. Their solution promises to save considerable time spent on documentation. This is reflected by their team motto in the picture below ("Our laziness drives us forward").

Are you interested, how to streamline the process of creating API documentation?

The best presentation

The award for the best presentation ended in the hands of teammates from the Android team, who focused on increasing the reliability and readability of the code. And their presentation drew our attention through deep reflection and showed that even after a year, they did not lose their sense of humor and passion for presentation.

The best idea

The triumph in the category of the best idea was won by a five-member team consisting of Android and Frontend developers and marketing. This group did an excellent job on a gamification tool for students, which we will certainly pay attention to!

Goal achieved

Although not everyone has managed to complete their projects in two days, we are keeping our fingers crossed that this will happen in the coming days and weeks. Some solutions have proven to be so complex that 48 hours is not enough to cross the finish line. :). However, we will try to publish and share them all soon as part of the "series" #opensourcemonday.

Even though we have 3 winners, no one is defeated. The main goal of Hackathon in GoodRequest is to increase the desire to work, team spirit and have fun. What the guys from team 12 also showed.

Don't forget to check what 2020 looked like in GoodRequest.