Hack day @ Google: a great way to build teamwork and drive innovation
A hack day is an event for our engineering and product teams to gather and collaborate on ideas that can help solve challenges in the company or related to the wider industry.
It is also a good opportunity for our teams to experiment with new ideas, try out new tech and maybe get to work with someone they haven’t worked with before. The teams were comprised of engineers from all disciplines; frontend, backend, test and mobile. They were also peppered with members of our Product Team to facilitate the day and help with ideas
Luckily our friends at Google said they could host it at their King’s Cross offices so we didn’t have to worry about a venue and they also generously supplied prizes for the winners and runners up
So….. The day started with the Google engineers taking us through a variety of exciting new tech that they have recently released. These comprised of 15minute lightning talks on new features for Progressive Web Apps (PWA), AMP, Tensorflow, Google Machine Learning APIs, Android O and Firebase.
Then it was a quick break for lunch and the afternoon was dedicated to hacking! Two of our product managers, Ian Curtis and Mark Channon were running proceedings using a compressed form of a design sprint (see here for more information).
First the teams had to think of an idea…
We gave the teams a list of themes that they could try to match to a technology they had been presented earlier. For example the below shows that you could come up with a feature or product that uses PWA and AMP using Video as the theme:
Then each member of the team had to sketch an idea as a finished product and they did this in a quick 10 mins ….
Then the second task was to refine the original idea by providing a storyboard of the journey a user would take when using the product/feature, again time-boxed to 10 minutes ….
Once each member of the team has their storyboard then the voting starts for the best idea. Each team will then build a prototype of the feature or product that wins the largest number of votes within their group.
Start hacking!!
And some more hacking….
The Google engineers were on hand to help with any technical questions and our product team members helped with shaping the team’s ideas further.
The teams were given until 5pm to get their ideas into a prototype so that they could be pitched to the other teams. Each pitch had to be a strict 5 mins and was cut off after this time to make sure that we could get through them all.
The ideas that came out of the day were very impressive and some teams were able to show a fully-working prototype. Here are some of their ideas:
- Personalised Push Notifications for Mobile using Firebase
- Natural Language Processing on user-generated comments to show Telegraph readers’ sentiment of our articles
- Google Home assistance to provide ‘my’ updates on live sport events.
- ‘Editorial Assistant’ to show related content to journalists whilst an article is being created
- Podcast channel using a PWA and AMP. (offline audio content).
- ‘Memory Sharpener’ — Watch a video and test the users’ memory of what was in it.
Once the teams had pitched their ideas it was time for the voting to begin. We did this using a polling app for Slack while we re-read out the ideas.
And the winner is ! ……… Natural Language Processing on user generated comments to show Telegraph readers’ sentiment against our articles. Below is a screenshot of the the working prototype. In the background it was sending the comments from an article to the Google NLP API and getting back a sentiment score for the user comments, then it represents this as a red/green bar at the bottom of the article.
Overall our hackdays provide a great way to drive team collaboration, try out new ideas and showcase the best of engineering driven product ideas. We look forward to hosting more of these in the near future, so happy hacking!
Special thanks to team at Google ; Nick Harthan, Andre Bandarra, Megan Parkinson , Paul Barnes, Luiz Gustavo Martins (Firebase), Chiara Chiappini (AMP) and Dmitry Malykhanov (Android O)
