5 Things We Learned from Hosting Hackathons
The Capital One DevExchange was founded on principles of co-development and developer engagement. These principles underpin our approach to running hackathons. To date, we’ve hosted eight events, in seven different states, featuring ten of our APIs. At each of these events, we’ve invited developers, designers, and product leaders to join us for a day-long exercise in building customer experiences with our APIs.
Along the way, we learned quite a bit about our APIs, the cities we’ve visited, and the different developer communities working in them. We’ve also learned quite a bit about the art of engaging with developers at hackathons. Here are five of the top lessons we’ve learned hosting DevExchange hackathons.
1. API Demos Matter
At our Boston hackathon, we introduced the world to our Digital Identity Products. Any time you introduce one new API, let alone three, it requires a longer demo and QA phase. But how do you balance the needs of the API demo portion with the needs of the coding portion? After Boston, we decided the answer was to split them into two distinct entities — demos and QA on Friday; coding, presenting, and judging on Saturday. This has had some distinct benefits for our events:
- Frees us from watching the clock and rushing our API demos.
- Gives us more hands-on time during the setup/QA phase.
- Increases ability to go deep into use cases during the API demos.
- More time for ideating and coding.
- More time for the teams to develop a rapport/workflow.
- Increased quality of products with stronger business plans and code.
- Decreased stress for attendees and event staff.
Debuted at our Denver hackathon, this two-day event format has quickly become the standard for DevExchange hackathons.
2. What’s the Dev Environment Got to Do with It?
In 2017, we previewed six experimental or pre-release APIs at DevExchange hackathons. This included:
- Boston hackathon — We previewed our suite of Digital Identity APIs.
- Philly hackathon — We previewed two experimental data-based APIs.
- Santa Monica hackathon — We previewed an experimental document storage and handling API.
These previews allowed us to collect invaluable feedback earlier in the API release cycle; helping create a better final product. However, we learned through the course of this process that testing APIs at hackathons can be tricky. After our Boston hackathon in July, we made a few changes to increase engagement with our experimental APIs. We learned that if we gave devs a separate easy-to-use environment with mock services, it was a lot easier for them to dive right into using them. This feature debuted at our Philly hackathon and has been an invaluable feature in our events since.
“We designed a lightweight hackathon environment which allows us to enable private and experimental APIs to developers alongside our DevExchange public offerings. We have seen this lead to innovative new app ideas where teams can spend less time configuring and more time coding.” — David Benko, Professional Services
3. Diverse Teams Win
We take developer outreach seriously and have always striven to attract a diverse group of attendees to our hackathons. However, despite our best efforts, attendance at our Philly hackathon fell short of our standards. That’s right, only one female dev participated in our hackathon that weekend.
We’ve all heard that diversity of backgrounds, experience, and thought makes for products with a deeper and broader use case. Going through our hackathon records, the lack of female representation in Philly was an aberration, but her team’s placement was not. Of the seven hackathons the DevExchange has hosted, six of the winning teams included at least one woman, and five of the winning teams included at least one POC.
And the hackathon after Philly? Santa Monica was our most diverse hackathon yet, setting the bar for what representation at a hackathon can and should be.
4. Conference Hackathons Don’t Need to Be Hard
Sure, time is limited and the competition for eyeballs and attention is fierce. But throwing a hackathon at a conference doesn’t need to be an exercise in futility. It can be a fun, casual exercise in coding and community building instead. DevExchange threw our first conference hackathon at Gluecon in June of 2017. Instead of trying to shoehorn our usual hackathon into the conference format, we took a more casual approach to this event.
- Keep it simple — We often debut new APIs or offer unique challenges at our hackathons — but new APIs and challenges can also mean new hiccups that eat into coding time. For this event, we focused on the products and challenges we knew best to maximize the time and energy available for coding.
- Keep it casual — Beer, pizza, some music — who says a hackathon has to be an overly formal affair? If attendees are missing social mixers to attend your event, why not bring some of that energy to them instead?
- Schedule it at odd hours, (but not too odd) — If you don’t want to go toe-to-toe with a schedule full of keynotes and workshops, then why not schedule around them? Consider holding the coding portion in the early evening when the schedule has died down and/or the demos and judging in the morning before they begin. We used both scheduling tactics at GlueCon and were quite happy with the results.
With only five hours of ideation and coding, the teams mirrored our casual format with humorous projects that focused on delightful interfaces and human interactions over refined business plans. Projects that came out of this hackathon included a digital swear jar; an app for making random, internet purchases; a customer retention app that leveraged light-hearted language; and a vacation planning Alexa skill that spoke in memes and music clips.
5. Don’t Underestimate the Human Touch
The 2017 Money20/20 Hackathon was our second conference hackathon and our first involving multiple API companies contributing their products — and prizes — into the development mix. Capturing eyeballs and attentions at a large co-sponsored hackathon can be hard. So how did we communicate the value and utility of Capital One’s APIs at the Money 20/20 hackathon? By focusing on the human touch.
Having a knowledgeable and passionate team on hand is the first step in introducing, impressing, and exciting attendees with your offerings. For Money20/20, we had our integration specialists and API tech leads personally introduce people to the utility and use of our APIs. We also had our marketing and API product leads help them with their ideation and product strategy. This approach allowed us to help encourage and support both the technical and business side of the products our fourteen teams built that day.
“The more people we meet and work with at our hackathons to more we learn. Talking and listening face-to-face to these talented professionals not only helps us improve our products, with every event we grow a community based on collaboration and shared passion for the work we do.” — Rachel Rique, Marketing, Platform Services
We always staff our events with a mix of people from different teams and roles, the format of this hackathon really highlighted the importance of having the right people with the right skills in place. It also illustrated the leading edge a co-development-based approach can lend.
We’d like to give special congratulations to the winners of the Capital One challenge at the 2017 Money20/20 hackathon. Team Pop used our Rewards & Credit Offers APIs to build an app for
personalized offers and merchant rewards. We hope you’re looking forward your prize — a 4-day VIP trip to SXSW and special demo at the Capital One House.
Our Commitment to Hackathons
“Being on the road in different parts of the country to host these hackathons has taught us so much … not only about our APIs, documentation, and portal experience, but also about the developer community itself. The creativity and energy we have encountered along the way is inspiring and keeps us focused on building even better dev experiences in the future.” — Lorinda Brandon, Director of Marketing, Platform Services
In 2018, we’re renewing our commitment to engaging with the dev community through hackathons. With a calendar full of new API releases and new hackathons, we’re excited to see what new devs in new cities build with our new API products. Hopefully, there will be some new lessons learned along the way.
For more information on upcoming DevExchange hackathons, please keep tabs on our events page for updates.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT: These opinions are those of the author. Unless noted otherwise in this post, Capital One is not affiliated with, nor is it endorsed by, any of the companies mentioned. All trademarks and other intellectual property used or displayed are the ownership of their respective owners. This article is © 2018 Capital One.
