Coinbase HQ was buzzing with energy and creativity last week as we launched our first ever 24-hour internal hackathon, No Sleep ‘Til Bitcoin.
We’re big believers in hackathons; many members of our team are hackathon veterans, and we recently launched BitHack v2, an external online hackathon which is currently in progress. However, we’d never run one internally. Would it make sense to launch an internal hackathon when everyone was already busy with other projects? Would people want to pause their existing projects to feverishly work through the night?
Coinbase strives to entrust team members with a high level of autonomy, and since our employees interact with, and think about bitcoin all day every day, we knew our talented team could bring any number of innovative bitcoin ideas to life.
We issued only two rules:
-
Don’t work on your “regular” projects: Company hackathons offer a rare opportunity to work on a completely new idea. Even though it’s tempting to catch up on an already long list of tasks, this is time for new projects.
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Don’t work alone: A hackathon is a valuable opportunity to step outside your comfort zone. It’s a time to pause your normal routine, and to meet and work with new people.
...and one piece of advice:
- Try to get some sleep: Staying up all night sounds exciting, but it’s probably not healthy (or totally productive). Sneaking in a few hours can make the experience far more successful and satisfying.
With the ground rules set, we got to work. The objective was clear and simple: come up with an idea, assemble a team, and build something awesome that would be shippable (even if barely) within 24 hours. It could literally be anything, built for internal or external audiences (or both), and ideas could be generated by anyone, with an engineering background or otherwise.
When the clock struck 3pm, the music began and a frenzy ensued. People debated the merits of different ideas, formed teams, put on their proverbial thinking caps and many donned their sweatpants (not proverbial).
Meals, snacks, blankets, pillows and a host of break-time activities were provided (4am ping-pong anyone?), along with plenty of whiteboards, conference rooms, and an endless supply of kombucha.
The next day, 14 teams presented their projects to the entire company and the results were remarkable. It was inspiring to see how rapidly these ideas had come to fruition, even with limited time, sleep and resources. Here are some of the highlights:
Below are some of the ideas spawned from the hackathon. Some were so compelling that we’re planning to refine and launch them as fully supported products.
Internally focused projects (to make work more efficient and/or to build company culture):
- Pongbot - A Slack Bot which facilitates 1:1 ping pong challenges, tracks scores, and maintains a leaderboard
- Wargames - A content delivery system that pulls data from a host of APIs to display useful and entertaining information on TVs around the office
- Varys - Encrypted internal messaging powered by Keybase.io
Externally focused projects (to make bitcoin easier to use, more useful, and used by more people):
- Venmo Integration - A proof of concept showing how you could send bitcoin to any Venmo account by email or phone
- Microtasks for Bitcoin - Earn bitcoin by completing small tasks/jobs in seconds. Try it out at bittask.io
- Apple Watch Exchange - An iPhone and companion Apple Watch app used to trade bitcoin on Coinbase Exchange
- AchieveMINT - Wearable fitness monitor which pays you bitcoin when you hit health or work out goals
- Bitcoin Commercial - A video depicting how Coinbase can help people send value to their loved ones
- Bite Sized Bits - Bitcoin explained: a blog for non-techies by non-techies: Bite Sized Bits
- BitsHunt - A guerilla marketing campaign where QR coded stickers linked to real bitcoin are placed around San Francisco
Congratulations to the two teams named “Crowd Favorites” by their peers - Pongbot and the Venmo Integration!
We can’t wait to see what you came up with during our external hackathon, BitHack v2. We’ll have an update on that in the coming weeks!
via The Coinbase Blog http://ift.tt/1SCJtNR
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