Why Hackathons Are Important For Software Companies’ Culture

Published in

codequest

3 min readFeb 7, 2017

As we’re getting ready to host codequest’s first in-house hackathon on December 12th-16th, which we will cover in-depth soon, I thought it’s a good time to tell you why I believe hackathons are crucial for a software company like ours and why they might be substantial for yours too.

I’ve come up with a personal list of the five most critical elements of our hackathon. They might not make your TOP5 list, but those listed below align with codequest’s big vision and goals.

Education

We firmly believe that education is the key to both personal and professional development. Our team attends meet-ups, conferences, and workshops on a regular basis. But what is education without practice?

The educational goal of our hackathon is to work with technologies we love and promote. However, not everybody on our team works with them on a daily basis. One of those technologies is Elixir, and that is why most of the back-end applications written during our Hackathon will be based on Elixir and Phoenix.

Knowledge Sharing

Mixed teams during hackathon mean people learning a lot from each other. In every group we’ve created, there are developers on every skill level. That’s how we not only help less-experienced employees improve their abilities, but we also give a proving ground to our senior staff who want to practice their project management skills or become more confident leaders.

Integration

One of the codequest’s primary goals was to create a family-oriented company culture. When recruiting, there are two things we focus on the most: skills and culture fit. Because at work, it’s not only about being the best engineer on the team; it’s about communicating with others and building friendships that last.

There’s a word “colleague” in English that describes a co-worker. However, I am proud to call all my “co-workers” friends, and as codequest, we want everybody else to feel the same way.

Also, because codequest operates in both Warsaw and Białystok, Poland, the hackathon is a great opportunity to have both amazing teams working on multiple projects in one place.

Maintaining the same culture fit profile and atmosphere between two offices is not an easy task. However, running an in-house hackathon might help us with that. A great team beats with one heart.

New Ventures

codequest is a venture studio; we help our customers turn ideas into excellent software products. But, we also build tools on our own. Our current in-house product is called codebeat.

codebeat.co is an automated static code review tool for developers. It supports nine languages. It’s integrated with Slack, GitHub, and Bitbucket — including Pull Requests.

Hackathon is a perfect opportunity for our developers to start new ventures. Who knows? Maybe a prototype created during the event will become the next big thing?

Fun

However, with all that being said, our hackathon’s key aspect is simply to have fun. We want to turn our ideas into reality and experiment with various technologies. Don’t be afraid to break stuff. Coding is fun, creating new things is fun. And that’s why our hackathons will always be about having fun.

Invitation to our Hackathon

If you’re in Warsaw between December 12th-16th and would like to participate in our hackathon, feel free to contact Tomek, our CEO, at tomek@codequest.com. There’s only a few seats left!