Last week marked our second annual Clari hackathon. Thirty straight hours of hacking pulled in almost everyone in the company: design, engineering, product, QA, sales, and marketing. After a day and night that was highlighted by killer (and critical) coffee, a midnight ping-pong tourney, an occasional monitor downed by a Nerf football, and a few people realizing that sleeping all night under your desk looks more comfortable on TV than in real life, we finally slid into pizza-and-beer-powered presentations and awards.
What we love about hackathons is that anyone at any level and in any function can turn ideas, interests, or solutions into reality. Every team and project was self-selected and results were amazing. The only guideline we set for ourselves was a vague connection to our business. From that seed, teams took off in wildly different directions. Here's a quick taste of the range:
- Mobile platform using multiple inputs to know exactly what a person is doing—bringing new meaning to "the right info at the right time"
- Data science expanding on the latest developments in natural language
- An alert cutting the time lag between a customer hitting a bug and engineers jumping on it to almost zero (not that we ever ship with a bug)
- QA tool to cut a daily task from 45 minutes to 15 seconds
- Customer service dashboards making it easier to make customers smarter
- Even marketing got some love (aka, Team Funlytics)
Our CTO was a hackathon judge, but he got so jealous, even he hacked! (And let's just say the colors and shapes of his visualization hack looked even better through sleep-deprived eyes.) Crazy.
"Crazy" probably doesn't accurately describe it though — here's a video that will do a better job.