Reflections on running my first hackathon

Some time back my two lead developers started campaigning for an internal hackathon as a way of improving team spirit, cross-training and letting off steam after a particularly arduous project. They are the cheeky ones on the left in the photo putting up fingers behind mine and each other's heads.

When they first made the suggestion we were in lockdowns, and I wasn't sure about how to run such an event remotely. So instead we waited and combined our first-ever hackathon with a return-to-the-office celebration.

Our objectives for the hackathon were:

1. to get people back into the office so people might feel safe there again
2. to get face to face, have some fun and build some team bonding
3. to allow people some time to be creative and try some new things out

We set the challenge deliberately broad - basically anything you want to code goes, but you must work in teams. We announced prize categories about a week in advance, so people could come up with some ideas and form teams. We allowed about 24 hours for coding, and an afternoon for demos and prize giving. We started the first day working remotely, as we normally do, and then about two-thirds of the participants made it to our office for the second day where large quantities of food were provided.

What did I learn?

1. It was hard work hosting the hackathon and coping with people who hadn't ever been to the office before and needed induction, door passes, and all the relevant admin. Ideally, I wouldn't have done the two things at the same time.
2. The participants were great at self-organising their ideas and teams, surprisingly (and entertainingly) competitive.
3. Non-coders didn't feel as involved, despite my attempts to signpost ways they could help a team through timekeeping, presenting, or designing.
4. Despite the challenges being completely open, most teams used the time to fix something that was bothering them in their day-to-day work. We saw projects aimed at speeding up our incident response; making it clearer to everyone which version of code for each microservice is deployed where; improving our CI pipeline with UI performance testing tools; thought-provoking uses for a raspberry pi and slack; automating various aspects of salesforce configuration and an experiment to break Elm, a supposedly uncrashable programming language.
5. People would have liked a bit more time, for coding, for presentations, and for socialising.
6. People eat more vegetarian pizza than I expected!
7. I was nervous about making sure people knew what to do and when. I thought I'd over-done the comms up front, but people seemed happy so I guess it is true that you have to say something 7 times before everyone hears your message.

All in all the team seemed to have a brilliant day, everyone - except a couple who had pre-booked holidays - joined in, and the feedback after the event has been resoundingly positive. Our photos are full of smiley faces. So objectives met then :D It will be interesting to see if the experience does encourage people to go back to the office more often on "normal" work days.

It may have been my first hackathon, but I doubt I can avoid the calls for a second. Next time I will get more help for myself in advance and on the day and allow a little more time at each stage. I want to think about how to structure the challenges more. And suggestions are welcome for more ways non-coders can get stuck in!