Insider Inc. held its second-ever hackathon - these are some of the top ideas our tech teams came up with
Here at Business Insider, our tech team was given that opportunity in our first-ever hack week in December 2016 - and it was such a success that we recently held "Hack Week 2: The Unhackening."
As a way to kick off our hacking, we hold a team meeting to pitch ideas, review some suggestions for projects, and form teams. All participants are then given four days - Monday through Thursday - to work on their passion project, concluding with presentations on Friday.
Each participant/team is able to use technologies they prefer, which really allows for creativity and gives everyone a chance to stretch their legs and work on something cool they may not have had time for otherwise.
Our first hack week, held last December, was a fun experiment that culminated in the whole team gathering in our building's auxiliary cafe for presentations. There was great energy in the room as the team shared their creations - like a lunch-ordering plugin for Slack, sentiment analysis of our story content, and even an interactive, customizable corn-hole game (an office favorite here.)
One of the award winning ideas, a webhook that shows editors who else is currently editing the same post, was released into production as a quick follow.
"Hack Week 2: The Unhackening" resulted in another batch of improvements, creative solutions and candidates for production-ready products. As is our (albeit new) tradition, voting was held for a variety of award titles. We spoke with a few of the winners to get a better look into their own processes and projects.