Designing a Hackathon
September 2016, EMC Louisville threw it’s first in-house hackathon. Participation was far above expectations, and we destroyed work silos that had been dogging major projects for years. The results were such that the directors and VPs have asked us to ‘take it on the road,’ and replicate the hackathon in other EMC offices across the country.
Below is some of the design, code and organizational work I did with the Hackathon Team to throw this event, plus some takeaways.
Event Branding & Swag
Posters
Attendance was a concern. EMC had never thrown a hackathon before and attendance was sanctioned but 100% optional. We started by commandeering the monitor to show subtle teases about the date and I designed, printed and plastered the site with these posters.
The gurilla marketing paid off and we had over 60% of the entire worksite signed up for two days of hacking.
Starter Projects
We had a wide range of ability represented in the different departments that signed up. In addition to providing hands-on instruction, we wanted to give several beginner projects and documented APIs to get people started. I designed and the Hackathon Planning Team coded each project, creating benchmarks in each branch to get the beginners experience creating an application from start to finish.
Git Repo & Designs for the Stash Leaderboard
Git Repo & Motion Design File for #EMC Tweetstream
We threw them up on Github and organized the teams with experienced leaders and less experienced team-mates so mentor/mentee relationships could emerge organically.
The organizers of the hackathon (me and four amazing coworkers) acted as the event’s floaters to unstick teams before they got too buried in technical problems.
What did we learn?
The event was Monday and Tuesday, so probably the best thing we did was schedule a long lunch the Friday before for sign-ups to grab their t-shirts and set their environments up. A large number of attendees had never used tools like Atom or Github even, much less NPM, so this cut down on any unexpected problems that would’ve killed momentum.
We were also taken aback by the creative energy people attacked their projects with. Everyone was ambitious, despite (or maybe because) some of the greener members, and everyone delivered something finished and amazing.
To summarize; if you’re debating the value of a few days unstructured time for your team to explore and learn, debate no further. In even the most calcified, ‘old-school’ organizations, these startup programs will benefit your org well beyond the small set-up cost.
If you have any further questions about how we organized an internal hackathon, or want to use some of the work we did for yours, message me on Twitter! I’d love to help!
