Acuris Hackathon 2019
At Acuris our software engineers can dedicate 10% of their time to professional development in the form of hack days. These fortnightly events allow our engineers to work on hacks, side projects or learning and development.
Recently we decided to switch up the format and create a two-day hackathon, open to everyone in Product Development. The department continues to grow rapidly and we saw this as an excellent opportunity for everyone to get to know each other better. We encouraged participants to work with people outside their normal project teams, and with other disciplines.
Unlike our hack days, which are entirely open, we decided on a brief to give the hackathon some focus.
“Smart Acuris” : Alternative ways of consuming our content.
For the event, we were able to procure some devices to play with, including a number of Amazon Alexa devices, a Raspberry Pi and several VR headsets.
We decided on the following format for the event:
- Ideas would be submitted the week before the hackathon on a shared Google slide deck
- Participants could join a team by adding their name to the relevant slide
- Any ideas with fewer than four team members were dropped. During our fortnightly hack days people work individually or in small groups. The intention with the hackathon was to encourage larger multi-disciplinary teams.
- The hackathon would run from 9:30am on day 1 to 4:30pm on day 2 — only during business hours though, as we value our sleep!
- Lunch would be provided on both days 🍕🥪 🥗
- At 4:30pm on day 2 we would gather for demos, followed by celebratory drinks on our roof terrace 👌🏻👌🏻
Before the hackathon our platform engineers created a fresh AWS account with access to APIs and services within our live Virtual Private Cloud. This made consuming our data much simpler and let the teams concentrate on their ideas without worrying about how to connect to our data.
During the two days the office was a hive of activity, and the hacks demonstrated what can be done in a short time with small, motivated, multi-disciplinary teams. The demos and presentations were of a very high standard and it was clear that teams benefitted from having more people and more time to work on their ideas.
We had some fantastic demos including:
- A news ticker on real hardware using a dot matrix LED screen and Raspberry Pi
- A deal timeline of a company in VR using an Oculus Quest
- A Bloomberg Terminal-style experience using OpenFin to leverage our data on the native desktop
- An augmented reality app allowing users to find out more about news articles in the physical world
The hackathon wasn’t a competition, but we did hold a vote afterwards to decide which projects should be shown in a demo to the wider business. The winners were:
- Acuris Minus-five — Making some of our paid content available outside the paywall to improve SEO and encourage new customers to sign up.
- Acuris Alexa Skills — Ask Alexa to tell you about Acuris news and intelligence on a given topic. Configure a watchlist using your voice and get notified when content is published that matches your preferences.
- Individual Recommendations — Content recommendations engine for individual customers based on what they read, powered by Elasticsearch.
The post-hackathon feedback has been very positive and we have plans to run this format again. It was a great opportunity to work on interesting and fun ideas that may at some point see the light of production.
We’re hiring 🎉 — If you’d like to know more about software engineering at Acuris, please get in touch.
