Alfa’s First Remote Hackathon
2020 was the year that saw Alfa’s fourth annual Hackathon in the EMEA region, and the first that we’d ever had to hold remotely.
Whilst the key themes of competition, collaboration and problem-solving remained the same, almost every other aspect had to be rethought. Over the years we’ve experimented with various formats for the event, with the aim of increasing engagement, facilitating cross-functional teamwork, and having fun! On each occasion we’ve been able to learn something new and evolve the event, listening to feedback and innovating as we go. This year was no different, only with a much bigger learning curve.
Each year, Team Hackathon is reincarnated with both hack veterans and fresh new faces, a few of whom have put together their account of our 2020 Hackathon below. We hope you can take some inspiration for running your own event; it’s certainly one of our favourite days in the Alfa calendar and we are busy planning the next one for September 2021.
In it to win it
Steve Kahn
Our Hackathons are run as a competition. We’ve tweaked the configuration slightly each year to find the winning format both in terms of agenda and hack categories. For the 2020 Hackathon, our event was scheduled over two full days, which gave participants the opportunity to block off their time and step away from their regular work.
Day 1 10am — Kick off
The first day began with a kick-off event, attended by all participants, which included both general event information and an inspiring talk by ethical hacker, Jamie Woodruff.
Day 1 Midday — Hack time
The metaphorical klaxon is fired to start the 24 hours of hacking.
Day 2 Midday — Competition entry
Those wanting to compete for the glory of Hackathon Champion and win great prizes are invited and actively encouraged to submit and present their idea and progress to their colleagues.
Hack categories
We formulated our competition categories this year to be as inclusive across all aspects of the company as possible, encouraging cross-functional collaboration. We always keep a Blue Sky category for those who don’t want any constraints, but for those seeking a little more structure we formulated the following ‘How might we?’ statements:
How might we simplify Alfa Systems (our flagship product)?
How might we deliver greater business benefit to our customers, sooner?
How might we make Alfa a better company for everyone, everywhere?
These statements align closely with our company strategy, giving the event an increased sense of purpose.
Voting and Prizegiving
Each team who enters the competition delivers a presentation or demo to showcase their idea, with the running order (frantically) assembled over lunch. The presentations are short and kept strictly (occasionally brutally) to time, and we schedule a couple of breaks here as some competitors will have had a long night and might need some coffee. The winners are decided through an anonymous popular vote using Slido, and subsequently announced by members of the company leadership team.
Building the hype
Adam Krolak
With the event date set, our aim on Team Hackathon was to inform, engage and build up excitement in the weeks leading up to the Hackathon. This was achieved in part through a series of weekly workshops:
Event launch
As the name suggests, the first talk was aimed at introducing our first remote Hackathon, the competition categories and showcasing successful hacks from previous years. Though general admin and InfoSec were covered, we really wanted to get everyone to start thinking about any ideas they might like to work on as well as who they’d like to work with. For the second part, we introduced an ideas board where ideas could be advertised to anyone looking for a team.
Tooling for remote hacking
With the remote nature of this Hackathon, the second workshop focused on introducing a number of tools that could help teams work and collaborate remotely such as Jamboards and Metro Retro, prototyping tools like Invision and free-to-use presentation visuals.
Find a team
Our final session was aimed at helping people to find a team. We introduced some “How might we” problem statements for each category to stimulate ideas, and talked through existing items on the job boards. Mindful that we’d had several remote hires who had never met another Alfa soul in person, we set up a sophisticated matchmaking service (read: Google Form) to help find teams for anyone that wanted us to.
Supporting secure hacking
Lorna Sharpe
Our Hackathon provides a great platform for our Alfa hackers to accelerate the development and implementation of great ideas, not only within our product but across the company to support staff internally. If not reviewed properly, having to implement security controls retrospectively can often make the development process of any idea unnecessarily difficult. We want to make sure we look at these things early on, so rather than stalling progress, we can facilitate even better innovation.
As everyone can go ahead and pursue anything they can dream up, the Hackathon provides a great opportunity for Information Security to engage with the rest of the business in new ways. Rather than just supporting staff in adhering to the usual day-to-day security requirements, we also:
- Use build-up presentations to encourage engagement and flag the importance of security and data protection,
- Publish special hack-specific guidance on the main security considerations at the conception stage, along with top tips to make secure development as easy as possible,
- Review hackers’ ideas ahead of, during and beyond the hack to help them incorporate security in a way that will support the progress of their ideas further down the line, and
- Are ready and raring to answer any questions that might come up as these great ideas are being brought to life.
Bringing everyone together
Ilaria Lombardi
The aim of our Hackathon has always been to create an inclusive, fun and social event. In our last Hackathon, we started the event with an inspiring speaker. Having a speaker to kick off the event is an opportunity to learn from previous experiences, at the same time build the motivation, and bring out the ideas to achieve your final goal.
The Hackathon is a competition and like every competition, we have prizes for the best ideas and projects in each category. The winners can choose their favourite prize from a variety of gift vouchers. To fuel the ideas, every participant was given a food allowance to keep going during the day while hacking.
This event is all about collaboration and it is a great opportunity to network and build work relationships. Therefore, we always give away branded items that create a sense of belonging, like T-shirts and the popular Alfa hoodies last year. Fun social time is another essential part of our day, so we always organise a game or activity to provide the chance to unwind and create connections. Last year this took the form of a remote quiz-bingo mashup!
Hack showcase
Brannan Hancock
We had 25 teams enter into the Hackathon competition last year, with a huge variety of ideas, spanning the four competition categories. Here are a few of our favourites:
Digitise the Library: At Alfa we’re fortunate to have a library where colleagues can borrow and request a range of books. However, the checkout return system is paper-based. One team of bookworms set out to create a simple web application to allow users to browse, checkout, return and request books easily. Using a mixture of familiar and new technologies, the team made great progress and learned a lot along the way.
Alfa Theming: A previous innovation project introduced a theme builder to our flagship platform Alfa Systems, enabling the branding of the application complete with colour schemes and logos. ‘Team Theme’ built on this by working to persist themes to the database, specific to each user, which would offer our clients far greater flexibility with their branding options. The hack proved to be very popular among stakeholders and has been adopted into the Innovation Process, where it is now in the late stages of prototype testing.
Humans of Alfa: Working remotely has made it much more difficult to get to know and make connections with colleagues. Drawing inspiration from Humans of New York, a team including recent joiners created a space in Confluence where people can share personal stories, interesting facts or captions alongside their photo, forming a network of Alfa colleagues.
Innovation at Alfa doesn’t begin and end with our Hackathons. Following each event, colleagues are actively encouraged to continue working on their hacks with the support of our dedicated team of innovation coaches. Many ideas fostered by the innovation process are later seen in production or as part of everyday working life. We can’t wait to see what our Alfa hackers come up with at the next event later this year.
Happy Hacking!
