Things I learned at our first Manila hackathon
On 28th-29th July, we hosted our third Tanda hackathon, and our first at our Manila office. Coming in to a different country and different culture I wasn’t sure how well our famous “Biggest Hackathon in Brisbane” would translate. This is the story of how I went from nerves to naivety in 24 hours!
We do a heap of stuff out of our Manila office, but this was my first time visiting. In hindsight, I wish I’d come here way earlier. Filipinos are really friendly, work hard, have good attention to detail, and mostly have awesome food! (Though everyone keeps trying to get me to eat this boiled chicken embryo thing…) We have teams here for customer success, sales, finance, marketing, and a few other bits and pieces. On the product side, we’ve been doing QA here for about 6 months now and we recently hired our first developer, AJ. He’s been with us for about a month now, and is focusing on building integrations point of sale software around the world.
Going into the hackathon I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but I was super impressed with the awesome ideas that everyone brought along and built. It was a bit awkward for me on the first night because I was used to Brisbane hackathons, where lots of people will have a few beers and then heckle during the presentations — whereas here everyone is a bit more respectful. At first I thought that this was because people weren’t sure what was going on, before realising that everyone was sick of me talking and just wanted to go hack!
The theme this year was Employee EXperience™, which is all about improving the entire work experience for employees! A lot of team focused on ideas around making it easier to clock in & out, or to get to work on time, both of which we think are pretty important. Some of my favourite ideas included Tandagutchi — a Tamagotchi style game where your pet gets upset if you clock in to work late — and Themework — a clock in app which suggests a new dress code every day, and only lets you clock in when you’re smiling (… I couldn’t smile wide enough to clock in).
But in the end there could only be one winner, and the grand prize went to team Tanya — they built a Facebook messenger bot that let you clock in and out by taking a selfie, and could also order you an Uber if you were running late. It was great to see a combination of some creative ideas and some great execution — well done to the team!
Another of the highlights of the event was seeing AJ take Josh (one of our co-founders) under his wing and help him build a full app. Josh has been trying to learn to code for the last year and making slow progress, but with AJ’s help he was able to build an app that automatically approved timesheets and do a live demo in front of the full audience. I don’t think he expected it to go as well as it did! Now we’re looking at integrating this into our core product.
I’m already looking forward to our next hackathon here, and also to our Brisbane hackathon in October. If you’re reading this, hope to see you at one of them!
Ps. check out photos from the event here: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNuGc0AcX1xKFwsNDKjmBE6I7dLX-VHlDbKs6M2togPsVnzT_qSXoMvvqQh8Ja5xA?key=blhQOVI0MzZwaHZOTVNBbWZuVHdWdWszcU50ZHlR
