Hackathon at hike
28th Nov 2014 was supposed to be a regular Friday evening. Except it was not — HQ office was buzzing with activity — it was the start of a 48 hour hackathon. Droves of team members had earlier formed teams and were now thrashing out their plans on the feature/product that they always wanted to build.
The rules of the hackathon were simple — There were no rules!
Just scratch that long standing itch that members of our team had and before we knew it, the ideas started flowing in.
Ideas…So Many Ideas!
The teams came up with ideas across the breadth of the product. One team, for example, was trying to make hike without the internet! Another team was working on a completely voice enabled interface!
Working at Hike clearly has its advantages — I mean you are building a product that is used by tens of millions of users and one that you can actually use day-in and day-out. So getting an idea worth implementing was not a problem — the problem was there was just too many awesome ideas for the teams to choose from☺
Every team had to prioritise that one that they’d want to build. My hunch is that this alone was the most hotly debated topic inside various teams.
This hackathon was never about building new things — some teams redesigned the existing chat interface to make it much sleeker and intuitive to use! I wonder what our designer must be thinking (LOL ;) ). My personal favourite was the one with the … oh, well I can’t write it here just yet. You’ll have to download hike and soon be able to use it!
‘fun’ not ‘Fun
The best part? The fact that the teams just let loose. We had so fun in those 48 hours. The ‘Mummy Game’ a highlight of it!
Musings
Reflecting, looking back I can’t wonder but think that one of the awesome side effects of the hackathon was that we ended up pushing our code to the limits. Could the database schema we use in Android scale to have a real time search? Could the existing UI design support new ways of interaction? That was a true testimony of the current code architecture — and guess what we passed in some tests and failed in some (we are humans at the end of the day too!). There are so many learnings from there that we’re using now to strengthen our code where required and so many more shiny new things that we can’t wait to launch!
All in all we had a great time building stuff and we can’t wait to ship some of this stuff. It just may be sooner than we think!
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