Remoticon2020: Bluecore’s First Remote Hackathon
By: Rod De Coelho
Tags: Bluecore, Hackathons, Software Development, WFH, Engineering

Every six months at Bluecore, we host a hackathon so that Research & Development (R&D), Product, and Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) can come together to work on creative ideas. This is an opportunity where our engineers can collaborate with colleagues outside of their respective teams and experiment with new technical solutions, designs, and implementations that lend to new ways of doing things at Bluecore.

It was a hackathon of many firsts! In 24 hours, we solidified 42 ideas into 16 projects, including a SQL parser and visualization tool, a campaign template browser extension, a Bluecore Site™ campaign debugger, designs for Bluecore Mobile, an Envoy HMAC Signature Verifier, and a motivational chat-bot personified as one of our beloved engineering managers — just to name a few. This was our first remote hackathon, which posed its own set of new challenges (blog on how to run a remote hackathon coming soon!). It was also our first dual-themed hackathon: Remoticon2020!

Our Themes

Remoticon2020 = Remoticon + 2020

The first theme, Remoticon, posed as a series of questions: “Given the new remote nature of the company, how can we improve our remote experience? How can we increase engagement and communication? How do we encourage remote collaboration or find new ways to provide feedback?” The second theme, 2020, a play on vision and insight, asked our hackers: “How can we increase visibility into our systems, architecture, and cost?”

But why dual-themed? The point was not to create a project that addressed both themes. Instead, we wanted our teams to have options and the flexibility to do something impactful and creative — to pick either theme or no theme at all!

The Results!

Not so quick — we’ll get to the results in a bit. First, it’s important to highlight how we judge our teams to understand how we chose our winners. We wanted our participants to create projects that reflect our motto, “as simple as possible, as powerful as necessary,” and to reward teams that maximize impact. Teams were judged on flexible themes and rigid categories such as: Highest Impact, Best Overall Project, Remoticon, 2020, and People’s Choice. These categories allowed teams to make better decisions when facing trade-offs associated with delivering a project while judges have a defined rubric to judge against.

Highest Impact Award

Winners: Shortly Team

Description: “A new URL shortening service. We use short URLs in emails because long URLs are truncated after exceeding a certain size, and we often need URLs to direct the user to a company’s website or product. Storing short URLs at scale is quite expensive — one email can contain >30 unique URLs. We created a scalable service that uses memcache and Google Bigtable to cut down on cost and complexity .”

Technology Used: Go, Memorystore, BigTable

Team Members: Mike, Glenn, Alexa, Selam, Marcel

RPC Request to Shortly Service

Diagram of Shortly Data Pipeline

Best Overall Hackathon Award

Winners: Account Health Team

Description: “We built the Account Health Dashboard with the purpose of helping our customer-facing team get a better overview of performance as well as quantify interactions with our Product Support team. Our goal was to empower the team to have more informed discussions with our clients and help them achieve their goals. We built the dashboard by uploading our Zendesk data and importing our Jira ticket data from BigQuery into Looker. Once the data was in Looker, we were able to build different charts according to feedback provided by our customer-facing team.”

Technology Used: BigQuery, Looker, Jira, Zendesk

Team Members: Matt, Jarno, Cesar

The account health dashboard (before)

The account health dashboard part 1 (after)

The account health dashboard part 2(after)

Remoticon Theme Award & People’s Choice Award

Winners: BaharBot Team

Description: “We knew from the get-go that we wanted to build something fun. We started with a bot that could post a question daily for our water cooler channel. Question of the day was something we had been doing for a while culturally and it has been a great way for many of us to bond in this remote world. Through the process, we added new features like “tell me a joke” and “break the ice” and even allow users to generate their own memes. We named our service BaharBot after one of our beloved engineers.”

Technology Used: node.js, slack API, imgflip API

Team Members: Trish, Jason D, James Lee

BaharBot Slack App

Slack channel conversation with BaharBot

2020 Theme Award

Winners: In-site Team

Description: “In-Site is a tool to help understand why a Bluecore Site™ campaign is not rendering on a target page within a website. It provides this capability on a customer’s website itself so customers can quickly solve the issue without needing to escalate this to the Bluecore Product Support Team. This can also help developers to quickly debug issues while developing and testing these campaigns.”

Technology Used: JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and JS

Team Members: Vansh, Shivam, Ankit K, Abhyam

In-site debugging tooling for Bluecore Onsite

Some thoughts on Remoticon2020

Alexa: “I really enjoyed that my team all got together on a zoom call and started working. Being remote sometimes makes me feel a bit disconnected, so I thought this was a fun way to connect with the team as we worked on different parts of the project.”

James: “I liked the cross collaboration of it — a lot of Customer Support, Product, and Forward Deployed Engineers got involved.”

Ankit: “It was a fun, engaging, and creative activity to bring in some excitement in the otherwise predictable schedules. Had fun brainstorming on zoom calls for hours at stretch. A bit weird to speak in front of an invisible audience though.”

Conclusion

The work that comes out of Bluecore hackathons often turns into productionalized parts of our system and this hackathon is no different — a group of the Remoticon2020 projects have impacted discussions of where we should invest engineering efforts in the coming year and a handful have become planned features in the current quarter. In the Spring of 2021, we will have another remote hackathon where we will continue to explore themes of remote work and visibility into our systems — as well as draw inspiration from any insights we develop from Black Friday and Cyber Monday, our busiest time of year. Congratulations again to all the winners! Until the next hackathon!