Greenhouse Hackday June 2020 (Part 2)
Earlier this year, Greenhouse hosted a hackday in June. We formed teams and spent all of a Thursday and Friday to work on a small project. Friday was spent finishing the project and creating video presentations to showcase the results to the rest of the company.
I’ve asked some people who participated to share their experiences below. You can also read our first post for this Hackday.
This first Hackday was such a success that we decided to have another! Our next Hackday is happening in mid-October—later this week.
What was your project? Why did you pick that?
During this pandemic, as we are all stuck working from home, with short commutes from the bed to the couch (or home office if you’re lucky), and no one to talk to but the plants, we wanted to recreate a simple office annoyance experience that we have come to miss — riding the elevator.
What did you think of your team’s end result?
I think we learned a lot about how some tools like WebRTC worked, and just how many pieces need to fit together to get a multi-person chat functioning. Mostly we had fun making up our own requirements and seeing what we could do in a short amount of time.
What was the most difficult part of your project?
Not quitting our “real” jobs to follow this dream to billionaire-hood
What was your favorite moment during the hackday?
There was a moment during testing when the Elevator Ride became more of a chat roulette, automatically pushing everyone into a new elevator once their floor was reached. As the wheel spun round and round, you never knew when it would stop….. 00! Not only was this delightful and an easy way to lose track of an hour, but may be considered for our next Hackday project — Who’s Eating Lunch?
Who was on your team, and how was your team dynamic?
Chris, Kevin, Vanessa, and Becca–we’ve all worked together before, in previous hackdays and irl, so it was a delightful reminder that we are all awesome.
What will you do differently next year?
Expand our Elevator domain. Maybe escalators? Ziplines? Who knows!
In Conclusion…
Entrepreneurship is one of the core values of Greenhouse, and Elevator shows year after year how we choose to be positive in the face of challenges, and lift each other.
ZScorecard
Who was on your team, and how was your team dynamic?
On my team was Mike Boufford, Max Sechzer, Stav Milstein, and myself. We largely worked independently after initially dividing up work.
What was your project? Why did you pick that?
Our project was called “ZScorecard”, and it was based around the idea that we would try to embed a Zoom call interface inside of our Recruiting app.
What did you think of your team’s end result?
The end result ended up looking great! I was super impressed with the work that my teammates put into the project, and we had so much more functionality than I would have expected to have achieved in just a day.
What were you proud of?
The most impressive thing my team did was add auto-edit functionality to the interview replay. As you clicked through the questions, it would mark the timestamps and then afterwards would automatically edit the interview recording for you to watch later. So cool!
What was the most difficult part of your project?
The most difficult part I worked on was getting the Zoom app to render on the page. Trying to render it in a normal React component did not work at all (I think their web app relied on a conflicting React version). I ended up having to just embed it in script tags on the page. It worked out for the demo, but that code was not production-ready!
In Conclusion…
Hackday was a lot of fun! I was happy with what we made. Oh yeah, and we were voted as “Crowd Favorite” amongst our peers, so that was awesome!
