Inside Our Hackathon: Real-time Collaboration, Coding, and Pizza

„Don’t we have enough programming on commercial projects?” said no participant in our internal hackathon. Members of the R&D Backend and Web Frontend teams met to increase our work efficiency by automating some internal processes and parts of our daily agenda.

How Do We Automate Processes?

We use Redmine as our project management system. Redmine is an open-source application with a modular architecture that plugins can extend. We use Redmine plugins to add functionality that is not present in Redmine Core. Plugins allow us to extend basic functionality and make cross-system integrations. For example, when a person sets time off in Redmine, it should be automatically added to the person’s Office365 calendar and also reflected as the Mattermost user status, so others see this information in the IM communicator when they try to reach out to the unavailable person.

Topics to Choose From

There is always something new to automate, and we gather ideas from our team members all year long. As time went on, our backlog grew, and tasks were waiting. To accelerate progress on these tasks, we organized an event for developers willing to participate.

Here is a sneak peek from our backlog:

• Add R&D teams-based permissions to projects.

• Create a new type of Redmine project – internal, shared automatically across internal members.

• Send notification reminders about SLA tasks when the end of the resolution period is near.

Why Hackathon?

Finding gaps in commercial project planning is difficult, and assigning individual tasks across a wide range of time to different developers is not an effective way of system development. We allocated a fixed timeframe where developers focused only on one thing without external distractions. A hackathon is an event that fosters team spirit and open communication. We decided to organize it without any race to be a winner – there was no competition; instead, we aimed for real-time collaboration. This made it easier to share knowledge about running and developing Redmine locally, provide help more quickly, and discuss issues with others.

Event Summary

We all agreed that holding the event in person only was a good decision. While it slightly decreased the number of participants, it significantly improved the quality. One of our main goals was to support real-time collaboration, and it was nice to see people helping each other, discussing things, and even doing collaborative programming. Our experience shows that there is always some new command you can learn from a colleague – each person has a unique way to achieve things.

Additionally, as with most hackathons, we confirm that having pizza available for participants always helps to keep morale up, even when tasks are more difficult.