Seatbelts on, it’s time for a Hackathon

How our ITVX Streaming team found their first hackathon

What even IS a hackathon?

Are you interested in software development, the odd burst of sensations that combine exhilaration, inspiration and motivation to fully indulge in your passion to create a prototype in 48 hours? If the answer is “Yes”, then my friend, hackathons just might be the thing for you!

Hackathons are events where teams collaborate on creative projects with the goal of creating a presentable concept or prototype. This is then pitched for potential production or competition purposes or even just as a form of creative self-expression.

Many features used by popular apps/sites today had their initial concepts birthed at a hackathon. Ever heard of Twitter? Well, that entire idea started out at a hackathon.

From smaller independent development studios to tech teams in larger organisations, hackathons have always brought the potential to jump-start a team’s creative and collaborative abilities — a concept that we at ITV have come to appreciate and enjoyed indulging in.

Earlier this year, our Streaming team, responsible for our content streaming technologies, took part in our first ever full hackathon — a two-day event, designed to allow collaboration both in-person and remotely. An experience we found so enriching, we wanted to share it with you.

Veteran ITV Engineer Wilson Espina:

“From a company view it showed that we do have talented devs. I liked the fact we got to work with people outside of my normal horizontal team which is always great. We got to see other people’s working styles and the way people approach problems.”

How it started

Often but not always, hackathons will have a theme attached, and in our case, our theme was “sharpening our toolkit”. Early suggestions included:

• Automating a task that will save us time or energy.
• Creating something that will expose something wonderful we do or something we need visibility on e.g. a dashboard or chatbot.
• Experimenting with a new technology that we see a need for in our codebase.
• Creating something that encourages collaboration between the developers in our community (or further-reaching).
• Creating something your team collectively feels passionate about, even if it’s not directly tied to our regular end product.

Though there were never any hard expectations of what we needed to produce from our teams, we all wanted the opportunity to get creative and try something new.

We have a very talented Streaming team that is really excited about delivering ITVX, our new streaming proposition which will be launching later in 2022 (you can read more about it here). However, to keep creative engineers happy, motivated and inspired, it’s also important to provide an opportunity to flex other technical and creative muscles in different ways.

New ITV Engineer Kimmi Gan:

“Having done hackathons at previous companies they encourage devs to get creative. And sometimes you might have an idea good enough to make it to production.”

How it went

For new starter developers, it’s very common to feel slightly overwhelmed by the sea of talented engineers that work at ITV. Some may find it difficult to forge connections with engineers outside their own team.

For veteran engineers, there may be a yearning to play with new ideas to improve the experience of product development or even the product itself. But due to the nature of the production life cycle, it can be hard to carve out the time for extra R&D.

The hackathon remedied this by encouraging engineers to mix and mingle with each other based on potential shared interests on new ideas, tech stack and a general desire to stretch their creativity and ingenuity.

As a result, engineers, both newer and ITV veterans experienced:

• Exposure to more of what other teams see as gaps across the team productivity, e.g. understanding what the backend teams need from the front end and vice versa.
• An opportunity to prototype genuinely useful solutions that had the potential to increase development productivity.
• An opportunity to prototype features for the existing streaming solution
• Stretch their creative-tech muscles in areas not directly related to our day to day work and indulge projects purely dedicated to fun, which can be a huge part in maintaining team morale and promoting interdepartmental bonding.

Here are some examples of the kinds of hack projects that we worked on:

• A continuation of an earlier Pa11y plugin investigation with an aim to integrate it into our developer workflows.
• A ScalaJS search bar that looks up any ID in all content services.
• A CLI tool written with Rust, which generates a React component boilerplate.
• A Slack integration using Jenkins and GitHub Actions with our pipeline, to notify when merges have passed or failed.
• A leaderboard-based platform game written with Unity3D games engine — just for fun.

Veteran ITV Engineer Gows Kiri:

“It seemed like people enjoyed just doing something different!”

How it’s going

The Hackathon strengthened team cohesion and created a greater sense of confidence in our team-working abilities. Some of the original concepts developed from the collaborative efforts of our engineers in just the 48-hour hackathon have continued — for example, the pA11y Plugin project was the basis for further investigation into accessibility testing, and enabled conversations with our Design team about some Storybook capabilities we could leverage.

Not all our teams had an opportunity to carry on with their initial concepts, but all reflect on the time very fondly and are rather keen to have another hackathon day.

New ITV Engineer Francis Mormah/Myself:

“What a great way to turn work into a game! It’s actually very nice getting to know people through their technical passions in a lower-pressured environment whilst impressively hacking out ideas.”

How’s it sound to you?

If you too would like to be part of a creative and growing team, in Streaming Technology we are looking for Front End Engineers. If you want to join a growing department with big plans, check out the job here!