SuperAwesome’s Hack Day May 2022 — embracing the hybrid working model

Hack Days are exciting opportunities for our Product team to spend some time away from our everyday project work. It’s great for the team to work on brand new innovations to keep the creative juices flowing and push ourselves to learn and grow.

How do we run Hack Days with hybrid working?

The past couple of years have been a rollercoaster with the COVID pandemic. This has led us to modify how and where we do our events such as Hack Days.

We run Hack Days twice a year, and for the past two Hack Days, we’ve taken on a hybrid approach — some of our Product members are either remote or choose to work from home, whereas some choose to come to the office for the Hack Days.

Account for mixed in-office and remote teams

Participating in our Hack Days whilst exercising hybrid working usually means that teams have a mix of in-office and remote teammates. We make it clear to our in-office participants that they need to come readily prepared for working effectively with remote teammates.

This can mean:

• Designing end-to-end solutions with virtual design whiteboards e.g. Miro
• Using online project management tools for task tracking e.g. Trello
• Implementing pair programming using real-time code collaboration tools e.g. VSCode Live Share
• Making use of our live-conferencing enabled meeting rooms for video communication

Remote-first approach for demos and our voting process

To keep both remote and in-office participants involved equally, we adopt a remote-first approach in how we demo our projects and run our internal voting.

Funnily enough, we use a past Hack Day project for our internal voting. Our Hack Day App was built by one of our engineers a couple of years ago, and it has been used for voting ever since. Participants upload their projects to the site with a short description and any useful links to code repositories and examples.

This Hack Day, our app had a massive UX refresh to make it even more remote-friendly and accessible. New features included an improved voting system, a “Hall of Fame” highlighting past Hack Day winning projects, and analytics tracking participation over the years.

Our demos are done completely virtually, with everything happening over a video link. Once demos have been completed, the votes are cast virtually in the Hack Day App and the winners are proudly announced.

The essence of our Hack Days

We spoke to a few participants and organizers from our 22nd Hack Day and put together their thoughts below. If you’re thinking about running a Hack Day, or wanting to explore a hybrid setup for your Hack Day, we’ve got some useful tips and viewpoints to get you started.

Alistair Francis, Senior Engineering Lead — Organizer

“Do not attempt to do this alone. Be a team. There’s a fair amount to do and a good Hack Day check list is too onerous for one person. Having a team who split tasks is the best way to have an enjoyable and manageable Hack Day.

If this is your first Hack Day, create a plan. If you’ve done this before, iterate on your previous plan(s) using feedback from the devs/yourselves/etc.

Always look for improvements and ways of trying something new. We recently moved from having one day hacks frequently to having two day hacks less often — requested by the devs to develop more meaningful hacks. I don’t see us going back — it has been overwhelmingly popular!

TL;DR : Be a team. Create a plan. Iterate.”

Atena Saadati, Engineering Lead — Organizer & Participant

“Whilst organizing the Hack Days, we’ve taken into account the fact we’ve been in a pandemic for the past two years, and so we’ve been conducting all our Hack Day interactions online. We allowed a small number of participants to go to the office for the Hack Days, and we’ve kept this number relatively low to ensure the safety of everyone involved.

Hack Days are one of my favorite days! I get to work with people I don’t work with directly; they give us the chance to spend a whole day with wonderful people from other teams, and this really helps our teams bond.”

Daniel Joyce, Software Engineer — Participant

“Our team chose to create a new solution for fully automated API document management by utilizing Postman’s API, some fancy bash scripting and harnessing the CI/CD process.

We had three developers and an engineering manager working on the project. At all times we worked via Zoom and using VSCode Live Share — this enabled us to seamlessly work on the same area and completely separate areas without disruption.

I loved the free-flow nature of the collaboration of my team. We had a mix of experiences and professions which all gave input into quite a technical project. Not only was it rewarding from a challenge aspect, but being able to bond with people in a different setting and atmosphere was tremendously fun, I look forward to our next Hack Day!”

Marta Lorenzo Ballesteros, Designer — Participant

“On a daily basis I work in the PopJam team. Something I love about Hack Day is having the opportunity to get to know people working in other teams, including understanding who they are, and what their interests are.

On our 22nd Hack Day, I thought of creating a concept where kids can safely engage and have fun with their favorite streamers in the developing metaverse. With the ‘PopJam Battle’ feature, kids could cheer for their fave streamer and feel a bit closer to them.

Apart from that the lunch with the team was awesome, we got to chat a bit more and the team ended up playing board games! I feel so lucky to be a part of the SuperAwesome product team, and I can’t wait for the next Hack Day!”

SJ Han, Product Manager — Participant

“I worked with David from the Platform team and Atena from AwesomeAds on the Hack Day app. As a Product Manager with no coding skills, my main input was presenting the outcome of the project. Presentation slides can easily be rushed in the last hour of Hack events so I wanted to ensure that we had a presentation that did justice to the hacking that David and Atena did!

The Hack Day app and the kick-off Zoom were good touch points for everyone to keep connected to the event. The final meeting of all the projects went smoothly with a mixture of pre-recorded videos and live presentations.

Whilst in the office, there were a lot of good vibes! Especially with a social on the evening of the first day with Articulate, magic tricks, party games involving lying and deceit (all in the spirit of fun), pizza and drinks.”

Ed Lepedus, Senior Software Engineer — Participant

“I really enjoyed our Hack Days. It was a ton of fun to take a little concept and really move the needle on it super-fast, working more closely with mobile dev than I normally do.

Also, I love Elixir, and it was great to put it through its paces trying to build a production-ready service in two days. I’ve always found it frustrating how long it takes to properly set up a node project including linting, databases, ORM etc, and it was a breath of fresh air to have all that stuff just work out of the box.

In terms of participating in the Hack Day whilst remote, I’ve been working remote for so long that I really wasn’t particularly conscious that we were remote and that it could affect us!”

Nicolas Sleiman, Software Engineer — Participant

“This Hack Day was great, as people came from all around the UK to the office where we were able to collaborate (and execute) multiple projects!

After the Hack Day we were also able to have loads of team activities than when we were just working remotely, such as games nights and going out for some well-deserved food and drinks.”

Another Hack Day sunsets

We had 16 registered projects and 45+ participants — with these being a mix of Engineering Managers, Tech Leads, Product Managers, Designers, and multiple levels of Software Engineers.

With democracy leading the way, our Hack Day app voting system revealed our winning project, Liveness Detection. We can’t disclose the details of this project — after all, a good magician never reveals their secrets! — but here’s what a member of the team, Patrick, had to say about his experience:

Patrick Mettraux, Software Engineer — Part of the winning team

“Hack Day over two days was great, and having a night of sleep to think about blockers and how to shift direction if we find it necessary to deliver something on the second day is crucial.

Within our team we all work remotely normally, so not many changes for us in terms of working together over video conferencing. Big shout out to Rob, the project idea was his and he warmly welcomed Matt and I into the team to work on it!”

Looking forward to future Hack Days

After another successful Hack Day, the team re-grouped and collected feedback from our Product team on how we could further improve our future Hack Days. A few key areas we’ll be focusing on next time are:

• Thinking outside of the box (maybe in the metaverse?) with more remote-friendly socializing
• Providing equipment to better enable hybrid work in the office such as noise-canceling headphones
• Expanding our in-office working space options for better remote collaboration

Our Hack Days are essential for our mission. The technology needed is built through innovative and out-of-the-box thinking, and it is through these times of creativity that we can build a safer internet for the next generation.