Usually, I have some idea of what I want to do for hackathon… but this time, I was so busy, I didn’t have a chance to pull anything together ahead of time. I literally pitched the idea to the gang at the last possible minute. And somehow, a team of 1 miraculously became a team of 6.
That’s a pic of Mike cranking away below—he’s a rock star. He just started working for AddThis a couple days ago, and he was one of the core devs that built our hackathon demo. I’m just so impressed by our team.
The process was refreshing, and surprisingly simple. We had a basic idea of what we wanted to do, I prototyped it, we tested the concepts with users, and then we built everything in a day.
Everything about this hackathon was positive and went smoothly. Here are some photos of other teams and their projects.
There’s Behnaz’s team putting together a living wall installation. It appears to be a box with plants, in the shape of the AddThis logo. Typically, hackathons are regarded as an engineering event, but our company has embraced all good ideas and extended the event to all people and disciplines.
Here’s a pic of Jim and Mike taking on a huge cross team hackathon project. In fact, they had the largest hackathon team in the history of AddThis—13 people.
That’s an entire tribe! Hah! Kudos to them—they won both the “most popular” award and CEO award.
That’s Ben performing singing/rapping a song (over Biggie’s “Hypnotize”) about AddThis. By far, it was one of the most creative and ballsy things I’ve seen anyone do here in a while. I definitely voted for his performance.
Hackathons are one of my favorite times here. I still remember my first project here—”Ask Foo”. It almost feels like yesterday. While it’s nice to solve hard problems, it’s sometimes nice to play around, cut through any process, and get back to the heart of building stuff in an outlaw-hackerish way.
I’d love to talk about the project in more detail, but it sounds like we may package it into something bigger. Sorry for the cliff hanger. Stay tuned for more.
I can tell you this, my team wants to release it to the public right now. They’ve gone as far as registering a domain and packaging it up as native mobile apps. Thanks to the team for appointing us with the UX Hackathon Award. We worked hard to keep things as simple as possible.
Big hat tip to Dave, Mike, Foo, Kirk, Will and Sammi on pulling it all together. Let’s go out and celebrate boys.
