Innovation at the speed of light: 20+ apps in 48 hours at the Miro x Junction Hackathon
Learn how over a hundred developers from across the globe built functional Miro apps and integrations in just 48 hours.
This past January, the Miro Developer Platform partnered with Junction to host our largest external event to date — an online hackathon held across different countries, developer backgrounds, and more. The result? Over twenty inspirational apps and integrations that help to streamline the day-to-day lives of Miro users!
The challenge
We challenged developers to empower Miro users to take their product development and innovation workflows to the next level with the power of the Miro Developer Platform. We intentionally kept the challenge quite open-ended and we’re glad we did — it resulted in a diverse set of themes and use cases: everything from AI to extensive import/export solutions in Miro.
The only hard requirement was that developers had to leverage the Miro Developer Platform’s REST API, Web SDK, or a combination of the two.
Who participated?
We saw a tremendous response from interested developers. With participation from 120+ developers, representing 20+ countries across the world, we had students, seasoned professionals, and more join us over the weekend.
The hackathon and the community we built that weekend (online) really captured the spirit of Miro as an open, collaborative space to build the next big thing!
App development
Participants took all sorts of different directions in their app development. One common theme among everyone? Little to no sleep 😉
We saw submissions across nearly every collaborative capability, but especially these themes:
- Artifical Intelligence / LLM
- Import/export capabilities
- Content Summaries
- Document utilities
- Diagramming
- …and more!
What did developers have to say?
“We developed an application to simplify the lives of students, researchers, [and] entrepreneurs…The ease of adaptation, even without previously knowing the [Miro] platform, was surprising. Rich documentation.”
- João“We enjoyed working with people from across the world, who we wouldn’t have had the chance to meet in person. If we had another 48 hours, we would connect our Miro app frontend to a backend simulation server to enable communication, plot graphs on Miro, [and more].”
- Awais“My inspiration was the sticky notes feature and the lack of a canvas model visualization on Miro boards. [My favorite part was] meeting a lot of talented people and getting awareness about Miro! (I didn’t know about it)”
- Santiago
The winners
Across the board, the submissions from the Miro x Junction hackathon blew us away. The hardest part for our jury was to pick our top winners across three categories:
First Place
This team’s app or integration scored highest across the board when it comes to Technical Excellence, User Impact, and Solving a real problem.
Second Place
This team’s app or integration was high-quality and scored in the top percentile for at least two of the judging criteria: Technical Excellence, User Impact, Solve a real problem.
Third Place/Special Prize
This team’s app or integration best utilized an experimental Miro capability. It created a dynamic experience for end users and fostered an environment of collaboration directly on a Miro board.
So, who were the winners, and what did they have to say about developing their app? Let’s check ’em out:
1st Place: Pull Request Manager
Creator: Jordan Spooner
This app integrates GitHub pull request information into the Miro platform via the use of App Cards, reducing the likelihood of pull requests becoming stale or overlooked.
What app did you build, and what was your inspiration?
[…] ‘Pull Request Manager’ [is an] app [that] allows software engineers and product managers to keep track of pending pull requests more effectively to avoid leaving them in a stale state. By importing Github pull requests into Miro app cards, […] all your pull requests can be viewed and tracked from one place! My inspiration came from my personal experience with Pull Requests becoming stale and having to resolve extensive merge conflicts or completely re-write the code in some cases! My team […] uses a Slack channel where we all respond to pull request links with emojis, so I thought it would be great to visualize this in Miro as some messages still get lost!
What was your favorite part of hacking on top of Miro?
My favourite part of the hackathon was how easy to use the Web SDK was! I found myself becoming quickly adapted to using the SDK, and I already felt like a Miro Pro within a couple of hours. I also loved the opportunity to be able to enter my first hackathon and have that sense of community from the Hackathon Discord channel.If you could dedicate another 48 hours to your app, what would you do?
I would add the ability to allow users to automatically generate an appropriate Kanban board to add Pull Request app cards to so that they can have a central area where their Pull Requests can live in the Miro Board. I would also add a more sophisticated Approval system as my team in Appfox like to have two reviewers per Pull Request; so a Pull Request can only be officially approved when two reviewers approve it.
2nd Place: Mindporter
Creator: Daniil Tang & Team
This app is your one-stop solution for bringing mind maps into Miro! Mindporter is able to take various mind map file formats and convert them into native Miro mind map nodes on your board.
What app did you build, and what was your inspiration?
Our team built Mindporter, a mind map importer/exporter for Miro which leverages on Miro’s experimental mind map feature. During our brainstorming session we had a few ideas on what to build, but eventually settled on a mindmap importing app because it was a highly requested feature. Though we’ve found similar apps on the marketplace, we figured we could build something better.
What was your favorite part of hacking on top of Miro?
We liked how quickly we could get our POC up and running on Miro. Good documentation as well as the flexibility in choosing either WebSDK or Rest API made development a breeze.
If you could dedicate another 48 hours to your app, what would you do?
We had a few ideas we couldn’t get to within the timeframe of the hackathon. One of the ideas we discussed was allowing users to save mind maps and regenerate them on-demand. Another idea we had was to improve Mindporter’s export capabilities to support `.opml` and FreeMind `.mm` exports. Lastly, we wanted to allow users to select different mindmap orientations.
Of course, this is just a snapshot of all the hard work and talent that went into our hackathon weekend. Don’t miss out on all the awesome demos in our recap video.
Feeling inspired? Build the next big thing on Miro
Don’t just take the participants’ word for it — building on top of Miro’s Developer Platform is your chance to build the next big thing for a community of 60M+ users.
