Looking back on 4 years of Hackathons
Next weekend is the 5th Tanda Hackathon, and the 4th in Brisbane. This year Tanda’s CTO, Dave Allie, has taken over the reigns in running the event. Now that I don’t have any logistics to worry about, and also in a last gasp attempt to convince you to buy a ticket, I thought it’d be fun to look back on some of the best moments from the last 4 years.
2015: “Open Data” except without good data
I don’t remember where the idea of a hackathon came about, but I did on a whim in March 2015. We put up an event about 6 weeks away, confident that if we did, we’d be forced to do something good.
Adam Hibble bought the first ticket ever. This was only about a month after QUT Code (now Code Network) had started, and he basically convinced the entire club to turn up — a third of ticket buyers said QUT Code was the reason they went (we sold 59 tickets total). It’s fair to say that without the help of Adam and the gang we might not have done another event.
We also convinced Keran McKenzie from MYOB to fly up from Melbourne for the event. He very generously donated his time, some cash, and some pull up banners to make the event look less dodgy. He also was by far the most professional judge. (The event page lists two — Keran, and Adam from Tanda — but we really wanted 3 judges, so on the day of the event I called a mate I met at the QUT bar and he agreed to come along and give some opinions.)
The event itself was characterised by the dataset we gave participants being incorrect. I spent most of the day re-generating it and trying to give them useful data to play with. Despite this, we somehow got a writeup about the event published on a startup blog. It promised further verified findings in a report which, naturally, never came.
The winning team built an algorithm that could predict who would take sick days. The guys who wrote that now run Maxwell MRI, a less impressive use of machine learning.
2016: “We have an API”
Everyone at Tanda agreed we needed an API for a variety of legitimate business reasons. We just never had gotten around to building one. I somehow decided that the best way to compel us to make one was to organise a hackathon (instead of, you know, organising an API).
So I put up the event, and wow did we get a lot of interest. Within a few weeks we’d sold more than last year total, and we ended up selling 147 tickets. In all the commotion, we forgot to actually make the API.
Luckily, Dave is a great guy, and took it upon himself to build it. In two months we basically went from 0 API to 1 dAvePI — we shipped it about a week before the event, and then continued fixing bugs in it until… well let’s just say Dave pushed a lot of code to production during the hackathon.
Another highlight of this year was that we moved into a new office the day of the hackathon. This made all the logistics much simpler.
But for me the coolest thing was the quality of project. We’d come a long way in a short time, and the winning teams all built fully functional products in a very short period of time. Big props especially to the Project 4 team that built a Tanda-Fitbit integration to measure who moves around the most at work. (Read all about it here.)
The worst thing about this event was definitely Tylor and Tom “hacking” us.
2017: Going Global
2017 was the first year we ran a hackathon in our Manila office. I wrote a bit more extensively about it here.
The highlight for me was seeing how well the model we’d built up in Brisbane could work anywhere we went. I’d never been a fan of full-weekend hackathons with a boring corporate sponsor trying to outsource their problems to a bunch of 20 year olds for free. Our events had always been short (24 hours) and encouraged you to build anything you like. You can ask us for help if you want; if you don’t that’s fine. So it was great to see that it wasn’t just students in Brisbane who appreciated this style of event.
We also met a bunch of great people through the hackathon, and a few of them ended up joining Tanda and helping kickstart our dev team in Manila. I’ve been really excited to follow their journey! People often ask why we do these hackathons — especially given my rant about corporate predators above — and the answer is pretty simple. 1) We do it because it’s the sort of event we wish existed when we were students, and 2) we do it because it’s the best way to find great people to join our team.
2017: do y’all have exams or something?
We also ran a Brisbane hackathon in 2017, and in yet another testament to my logistical genius, we did it in the middle of October exams. Despite that, 100 people came along and built something cool with our new Webhooks platform.
For me one of the coolest things this time around was seeing how much Tanda people got involved in the event. On a whim I decided to add a new prize — the Josh Cameron award for the best no-code project — because we’d all been getting obsessed with Zapier lately and I figured there’d be a heap of interesting things people could build without writing any code.
Turns out not many teams actually did that, but a bunch of Tanda people got involved in other teams, either by helping them to develop their ideas, writing code with them, or just making sure everyone had plenty of coffee and beer. The winning team, co-starring Rod and Kaitlyn, perfected this strategy.
2018: ???
Highlights so far? Well, the hackathon trophy broke. We’d been engraving this trophy after each event with the name of the winning team, but some time in 2017, the head snapped off thanks to the Brisbane heat.
Luckily, Dave has found a replacement.
But I think the biggest highlight so far was the moment you bought your ticket!
Update: read about the 2018 hackathon here (no horse trophies).
Want more events? We’re also running a sprints workshop in May. We’ve found the Sprint process a great way to find quick solutions to hard problems. Come along and learn all about it!
