What is a hackathon anyway?

A hackathon is a time-limited event where the engineering department, UX and design – even marketing and sales – come together to collaborate on a project with a particular focus. The time limit forces participants to boil down visionary concepts to concrete, applicable solutions.

While hardware and software teams often work alongside, hackathons give them the place to collaborate on creating something new, or solving a specific issue. Besides finding an answer to internal workflow problems, hackathons could help the business innovate new ideas.

At hackathons, participants shuffle teams around and work with no restrictions to the project, which unleashes people’s creative energy even more than in day-to-day operations.

The sky’s the limit at any hackathon because of the casual, creative environment. In our experience, they can invigorate the entire team by boosting these four essential areas:

• Teambuilding

  Just as it is great for problem-solving, hackathons work as a bonding exercise too. We have people from many different backgrounds and nationalities working together, and hackathon events push all members to unite and brainstorm. Bringing together the entire team is a great opportunity to share insights and knowledge while also learning from each other.

• Innovation

  We can’t afford to stop focusing on product development, no matter how well our growth efforts are coming along. We want to do better, and we can’t do that without giving center stage to the engineering team on a continuous level. Just as customer needs change, so should our product. Hackathons help predict and improve that development.

  Even though we’d like it to be, problem-solving is rarely a linear process. The creative environment of hackathons allow new ideas to flourish in a vigorous way, creating a ripple effect throughout the entire company. Suddenly, people not within the engineering team start to realize the endless amount of technical possibilities that can be achieved when the team works together.

• Company culture

  Hackathons give everyone an opportunity to try another, unconventional role and discover other challenges and ways of thinking than usually.

  The time spent understanding other areas of expertise, their particular technicalities, abilities and challenges, gives a more detailed level of insight that can be applied afterwards. Besides working together in less typical groups, it helps the team see the company as a cohesive unit.

• Recruitment & branding

  Every tech company and startup want to be perceived as “hacker-friendly”. Certainly because we believe it to be true and something our whole business is founded on, but also because we gain awareness, even if the hackathon is only internal. This helps attract top talent and continue to push already onboarded talent to bigger, better things.

How we do hackathons at Airtame

Airtame builds hardware, firmware and software, all platform-agnostic, which means there are numerous opportunities for exciting projects and creative freedom.

We do not have strongly divided departments at Airtame, and we work together towards a common goal on a daily basis. However, hackathons still provide us with the chance to tie together different perspectives and touchpoints in a risk-free environment, and that is both refreshing and exciting.

We host 3-4 hackathons each year at Airtame, and they are usually restricted to a 48-hour period. As you can imagine, those two working days are buzzing with bright ideas and imagination. The whole office is lit with a vibrant energy that feeds through all departments.

The hackathons we host differ each time. Sometimes they are company-wide, other times confined to one department that dedicates it to a specific consumer-related pain-point. We often have a theme for the hackathon that participants must gravitate towards. At our last hackathon, the theme was “space” – not for any particular reason other than we’re a bit occupied with our office space at the moment because we’ll soon be moving to a new HQ. Hence, space is on everyone’s mind!

There are pros and cons to both setups. It’s not easy to manage an all-team workshop for several reasons, one being that it takes focus away from directly revenue-tied tasks, and second because the coordination is a pain. On the other hand, hackathons build a bridge to the world of developers. They offer a different perspective the engineering team couldn’t think of besides supplying the technical swag other departments lack.

Organized chaos = lots of fun

Yes – fun! It’s something we prioritize, and we’ve taken it to the next level for all employees several times, most recently for a Workathon in Greece! Our workathons give us the chance to work cross-team in a different environment, and they function both as a team bonding exercise and a work sprint.

While hackathons are not mandatory, it’s an essential part of our company culture, which is why we strongly encourage everyone to participate – unless they have a pressing issue. We also encourage working in teams, but working allow is allowed too.

The pursuit for “the perfect hackathon” …

Hackathons give the freedom to work on something completely different and come together in a stimulating environment. At hackathons, we can all learn from each other and gain inspiration from other areas of expertise.

Whether it’s a technical workflow issue or a new innovation free of restrictions, there should be room for fun while figuring out the best solution.

What does the perfect hackathon look like? It’s hard to say, but we do know it involves lots of pizza!

Have hackathons helped your business? How do you do them? We want to hear all about it!

The post How and why we do hackathons at Airtame appeared first on Airtame.

The house is surrounded by tall, green trees and blue ocean. In the backyard, there’s a sauna and a shockingly comfortable 60℉ pool. At any given time, there are people glued to their computer screens, steaming like a clam in a towel in the sauna, or getting in a workout on the lawn. And did we mention there’s a chef, who cooks a killer chicken curry.

This was Airtame Workathon 2016. We had fun, we ate well, and we worked damn hard. See for yourself in this video we made of our time at the Airtame Workathon.

And now we want to share it all with you by telling you about our successes and frustrations that led us to pack our office into a van and move our team to a vacation house.

A little backstory

Airtame Workathon is a mix between a hackathon and a company retreat. Our founders, Jonas, Attila, Marius, and Brian, dedicated a lot of their time in the previous weeks planning our trip and pinning down concrete goals for the trip.

This wasn’t their first rodeo. Last year, the Airtame team was smaller (about 20) and a bit more wet behind the ears when Airtame did Launch Camp, a work retreat to a vacation house in the woods. At that time, we were gearing up for the launch of our product.

We did launch and it was a harsh taste of reality when we failed to meet up to everyone’s high expectations. Every day since then has been spent turning this around, as you can read more about in this guest post on Indiegogo.

A year later, our product is out in schools and offices across the world and our team has grown bigger and wiser. But there’s still a lot of work to be done.

You, our customers, partners, and friends, have given us great feedback and the Airtame Workathon was about reaching the expectations you have for us.

A Day at Airtame Workathon

Our team had clear goals set for our 10 day hackathon/retreat. We had some planned activities, but for the most part, we were free to work on our tasks independently. A day at Airtame Workathon went something like this (See more pics on the Airtame Official Instagram):

8:00 – 10:00 – Breakfast
10:00 – 10:30 – Daily standup meeting
10:30 – 1:00 – Work, work, work
1:00 – 2:30 – Lunch & Learn
3:00 – 5:30 – Work, work, work
5:30 – 7:00 – Crossfit WOD or walk on the beach
7:00 – 8:00 – Dinner
8:00 – 12:00 – Work and/or relax in the sauna

What we got done

Our strategy for this camp was to focus our efforts into one overall goal or project. We weren’t allowed to touch any unrelated tasks (except for the support team, of course, because customer service never sleeps).

The last day of Airtame Workathon was Demo Day, the day where we got to show how far we got in our goals. The idea wasn’t to finish our projects. As our CEO, Jonas Gyalokay, said, “If you got everything done that you planned, you were not ambitious enough.”

The general gist of what we did during these 10 days goes as follows:

Engineering Team

? Core
We rewrote a lot of the streaming software (the magic bit that captures the screen of your desktop and sends it to your Airtame). We also made it possible to set a pin code to start a stream, which is a frequently requested feature.

? Application
The application team shipped out a new version of the software that included a new app design! Check out more on the new app update 1.8 here in our blog post.

? Firmware
We built a new Chromium-based browser that loads dashboards faster. We also started setting up a new network manager, which will help us monitor WiFi connections and speed up connection time. Last, but not least, we added a firmware 1.7.1 hot fix.

? Web
The web team set up a shiny, new customer review page that is now live! We also worked on a newly designed splashscreen that was something we started developing at our last hackathon.

? Infrastructure
Before the Workathon, the infrastructure team monitored and gathered metrics on our testing and production environments. They used the 10 days to continue setting up separate testing and production environments that will make our product development process more efficient.

☁ Cloud
This is a project we started on recently that you will hear more about in the near future. For now, let’s just say we made some proofs-of-concept and are moving ahead on what is going to be a great addition to our product.

? QA
Our QA team set up automated testing for the Airtame desktop application. In particular, tests that trigger events on the user interface.

Experience Team

? Marketing
We’ve set up some excellent email flows that will make sure everyone who buys an Airtame gets great service from our support team. We also ramped up our ads and carried out a reach out campaign.

? Content & Design
We wrote more product comparisons and updated content both on our website and our Amazon page. Our goal is to give potential customers as much information as possible, so they can make informed buys.

? Support
We took this time to get a major project underway of redesigning the Airtame help center. We set up the basic structure of the new help center and will keep working on building it up.

? Sales
The Airtame sales team spent most of the camp catching up with our current and potential customers who are testing Airtames. In total, we had more than 80 phone conversations and face to face meetings with customers and resellers.

On to the next one

Overall, we feel good about the work we did. We put down a solid foundation for things to come and will spend the next months ramping up on the projects we started.

Airtame Workathon did its job of boosting our creativity and productivity. Even though we’re happy to be back in our usual office, we’re already looking forward to the next Workathon.

The post Airtame Workathon 2016 appeared first on Airtame.