UC Hack-A-Thon 2020

By —Anupam Singh (Engineer, Android Platform)

We are experiencing unprecedented times, with markets rising even in worldwide economic slowdown and people being isolated in their homes for over 100 days now.

With prolonged lockdowns and social distancing being the new normal, companies and people are fighting hard for survival.

India went into a nation-wide lockdown on the 25th March 2020. We at Urban Company started WFH on 13th March 2020, three weeks before the nation-wide lockdown kicked in. A workforce of 1300 had to re-draw all of its roadmaps and figure out a new way of working.

But, from disrupted plans rise disrupted minds. We knew it was time to bring back an old Urban Company tradition, something the entire tech community is enthusiastic about, and simply being part of which keeps the adrenaline pumping. Enter UC Hackathon!

UC Hackathon

Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash

History

Urban Company has always pushed for tech innovation that comes from within, giving the power into the hands of devs and letting them fight it out for the coveted title of UC Hack-A-thon Champion.

You can read about it here.

So we decided to host our (dare we say world’s?) first remote Hackathon at UC — which gives devs an opportunity to work on an idea that they have always wanted to implement, but just didn’t have the bandwidth to do so.

Challenges

Remotely organising such an event at scale came with its challenges. To list a few:

1. Motivate people to participate in the first place.
2. Solve for missing “people interaction”, which is one of the USP’s of the Hack-A-thon.
3. Make sure it’s fun and competitive.

Kick Off and the Inertia

Successful event is like gravity, all it takes is a little push—it can be internal motivation, bribe (¯\_(ツ)_/¯), unhealthy snacks, monetary rewards or old school tricks like:

Persuasion

Abhinav (VP, Growth) utilising hIS daughter’s cuteness to get people to sign up for Hack-A-Thon.

Dominance Hierarchy at Play

Founder helping out the organisers big time. “Drink” of-course refers to water here.

Soon the critical mass shifted in support of the remote Hack-A-thon and, of course, the product teams saw an opportunity to do what they do best — pushing their ideas, which normally would’ve taken a sprint, to be done over a weekend……..pure evil (genius).

I know karma probably updated the product teams’, and also my, counter on this one.

Format

Teams allowed: Engineering & Design (& Product :P)
Rules:
- Max team size of 4
- Idea must not be an on-going or a planned project
- A demonstrable prototype mandatory for judgement

Judging criteria

- How innovative is the idea
- Production feasibility
- Relevance to UC
- Working prototype
- Presentation of demo

Theme and Teams

In total, 70 people participated out of the 98 from Engineering and Design.
They collaborated to make 29 teams across 3 themes:
- Unlock partner happiness
- Unlock customer happiness
- Tooling & productivity nuggets for UC

Customer side focused on increasing user retention through rewards and loyalty programs, and to improve app experience through offline games and wall panting options in app.

Partner side was heavy on solving for corona crisis with video calls for training, money planning using goal based system and improving app experience using chatbot.

Platform team picked problems to improve dev experience such as adding IntelliSense through swagger schemas, cost optimisation on AWS.

Entertainment

While the teams burned the midnight oil trying to code-up something from scratch, all the while communicating over slack, with live corona updates running rife on the news, organisers had to take the entertainment in their own hands.

The fun schedule, Raghav (co-founder) putting a smile on people’s faces, and the virtual smoking lounge because being cool is mainstream.

Midnight Meme-Wars

We chose themes which always get a reaction in India(Politics) and inside UC (Founders and Product Managers). Participants were creating memes on the fly and posting them on a common slack channel. Others picked the winner by voting via slack emoticons.

Trust me these are not even the funniest ones, the real deal, like Aliens in Area 51, has been kept as a secret.

Raghav joining the meme party.

Demo Time

As the Hack-A-Thon From Home format demanded zoom calls for demos, we couldn’t opt for one meeting with 20+ demos. To avoid the digital chaos, teams were divided based on the themes under which they’d registered. This made the demo procedure quicker, with 3 demos being judged by 3 vertical heads at the same time, one may even call it parallel processing in play — a UC norm.

Well, at least design team pitched in to keep the creative juices flowing with such posts.

The Finals

Two teams per vertical were selected for a final showdown, with a UC-wide open invitation to tune in.

Varun (co-founder) with his thinking hat judging the finals.

Winners

After all the toil, spread over two days, with 30 teams fighting it out for the coveted UC Hack-A-thon Champion, with eyes burned out from the screen time, eardrums numb from continuous zoom calls, and bodies sleep deprived yet “high” on caffeine and UC spirit, our champs sailed through.

UC Spirit

The UC spirit, at its heart, embodies three core values.

We HUSTLE through the difficulties and procrastination.
We REIMAGINE the solutions and challenge the status quo.
We prize OWNERSHIP.

The biggest satisfaction of any such event is getting to see these ideas come to life, that’s what makes these events so powerful.

Winning ideas that have gone live:

1. Chalk Walk: Team’s objective was to set up a platform for remote communication with our partners through video conferencing on their UC app.

2. Service Elevator: Team added type support within our RPC framework. This helped with more automated validations, auto-complete suggestions of RPC to speed up our development process, reduce errors.

A few more ideas that have gone live:

1. Falcon: A business visibility, actioning and supply management tool for internal usage.
2. Jazbati Jawan: A game to fight COVID-19 while customer app is offline

Getting bored? Dodge the corona virus in UC app.

And no matter what, at UC we don’t give up, be it the corona pandemic or writing a blog post after multiple reminders and numerous death threats, we always come through.

Look at the dates!

Thanks to the Organisers

People liked the event, heck they loved it, the energy was at an all time high, with competitive and ‘pun’ny juices flowing continuously for 2 days.

But this would not have been possible without the unsung heroes who put in their heart and soul to make this event a success.

The Pandavs who made it possible.

For more stories about what goes on inside Urban Company follow us here.

About the author –

Anupam Singh is a full-time Android geek at UC, part-time host of androidiots (podcast) and booktards (book-club). He is very good at random discussions (from salt to software) but very bad at writing blogs timely!

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