Our first hackathon: A behind the scenes story of how we did it

At cloudmobility, we believe in enabling our customers to shape the future of mobility and transportation.

It’s from the first day that we believe that shaping the future of mobility is only possible with great people. That is why we strive to find the best, most creative, and highly engaged people. Those are all words we can use to define our current team.

Having such a creative team means that everyone has ideas on how to make our products better. The team’s voices, together with customer feedback have big importance on what features and products are part of cloudmobility.

We truly believe we have the potential to create innovative products. People have the opportunity to do it on a daily basis, while they work with their team. But we wanted even more. We wanted to create something that would stimulate people to think big, giving everyone the opportunity to build something they believe can move the needle on cloudmobility.

That’s what lead to the #1 cloudmobility hackathon.

Besides how creative and innovative the people we have in-house are, cloudmobility has at its disposal a few more conditions that we consider ideal for an event such as a hackathon:

• We have deep knowledge of our own products and the market around them
• We have a close connection with customers
• We have privileged access to cloud resources
• We know how cloudmobility works under the hood

This together with the idea of having people with different teams interacting made it all even more appealing. What better way to share knowledge than having cross-functional teams working to develop an idea?

People would be motivated, get to know the colleagues better, have fun, and build something that would help cloudmobility? Not doing it would be a no-brainer.

Unfortunately, the global pandemic situation didn’t make it easy for us to get together and have fun, as we normally do. But since we’re a distributed team from such an early stage, doing the hackathon remotely wasn’t that big of a problem, I’ll tell you what we did to facilitate the hackathon further down this post.

To help scope the ideas, we had to define a focus for the hackathon. One that’s not too broad, but one that doesn’t limit people’s creativity.

The focus

Building products on top of cloudmobility namespaces (CNS)

We gave participants access to cloudmobility namespaces, and from there it’s up to them. The ideas could go from products that make use of cloud resources, to features that improve the platform and solve customer’s needs.

There was one single rule: all the projects/ideas need to run on the platform. Getting the people that are building a product to use it is a great source of feedback and an even better way to emphasize with customers, feeling the same challenges they do.

The format

The hackathon consisted of 1.5 days of building on an idea followed by a small 5-minute presentation with 2 minutes of a Q&A section. Each team documented their project, as well as the problem it tries to solve and how they plan to do it.

This whole process was also documented on cloudmobility’s social networks during the day, so if you’re curious about how did it go, you can find it in our Instagram highlights and on LinkedIn.

Ready, set, go!

On top of the access to resources on cloudmobility’s platform, we created a hackathon starter kit, which included a few more things:

• Documentation of all the available APIs
• Access to all the product code

As a means to foster collaboration and discussion during the hackathon, each team had its video/audio room. These rooms were also open to everyone, resembling a physical hackathon environment. I can say it worked very well, as we’d feel the presence of everyone around us, and could quickly go and have a chat with them.

To help the participants, a dedicated team of advisors was available to help guide the teams and answer any questions arising during the hackathon, as well as provide technical help if needed.

From here, it was up to the participants, I can only say our hopes were high, and we weren’t wrong.

Teams and ideas

As we wanted people to be very motivated on whatever they were building, we let the teams form organically. We created a session where people — which we called idea CEOs — could pitch their ideas to find other people that were interested in developing them further.

This resulted in forming cross-functional teams of 2 to 4 people, working on the following ideas:

• S3 object storage — explore S3 object storage on cloudmobilty
• Code focus — an easy way to bootstrap an application on cloudmobility, providing all necessary tools and configurations
• Cloud shell — an in-browser shell to cloudmobility users
• Terraform provider — a declarative way to provision cloudmobility resources
• Quick preview — one-click deployments based on a git repo
• Serverless compute — deploy serverless functions o cloudmobility

Just from hearing the quick pitches and seeing the enthusiasm of people around it, we were already excited. From here on, it only got better as the teams worked on this for one day and a half, and ended with a presentation that struck many “wows” on the audience.

All of the presentations clearly stated the problem they were trying to solve, and why. They looked at cloudmobility as a customer that wants to build something and presented a solution to the pain points experienced. On top of all of this, the teams also started thinking of what it would take to add such ideas to cloudmobility, which challenges we would have, and what was missing to make these features production-grade.

If you’re as curious about these ideas as we were, we got the teams to tell us what they’re trying to solve, and to present their solution to you in a blog post such as this, so stay tuned!

Conclusion

The hackathon was even better than we expected. It was delightful to see the excitement in people, and even more interesting to see what can be done when you leave smart, creative people to build something out of their minds for a couple of days.

We’re thrilled with the hackathon results. We’re actively looking at the built projects and gathering the knowledge that resulted from them, to see how we can integrate them on the platform since they solve very concrete user problems.

The hackathon was a success in all aspects. It was definitely something that will not be a one-of-a-kind event! We’ll be posting more about these kinds of initiatives here, and we’ll fill our promise and share with you the individual team’s blog post about the projects.

At cloudmobility, we believe, that there are no limits for people who are ready to prove themselves and are driven by what they believe in.

Our work ethic is built around diversity and constantly challenging ourselves to deliver the best products for our customers. If you are curious, check out our open positions and come join our team.