Beyond the Code: How Hackathons Drive Innovation and Connection at MOIA
Written by: Yannick, Max, and Maimi
Towards the end of last year, a small group of colleagues from different departments came together to organize a 2-day hackathon for the whole company.
Why a hackathon?
Even though hackathons are tons of fun, giving everyone a pleasant two days isn’t the main motivation behind them. In modern tech culture, continuous collaboration is a huge priority. This includes the typical rituals such as dailies, pair programming sessions, and retros, but also extends to the occasional game of table tennis or events such as hackathons. But why, really?
Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps is one of the books that the company culture at MOIA is based on. The authors take a scientific approach to the question of how modern tech companies can improve their delivery performance. The general idea is that more freedom and more available knowledge leads to an increase in productivity: Have people talk to each other. While we are mainly looking at hackathons here, there are many ideas mentioned on how to achieve this.
The general approach is to connect the dots. You want to ensure that people exchange information and resources that already exist within the organization. Additionally, you want to keep the barriers low for cross-team collaboration. Whatever you’re trying to build, the odds are high that, depending on the size of your organization, somebody has already built something similar. You need to dare to ask.
Especially in organizations the size of MOIA (~400 employees), it is getting increasingly hard to know everyone. What started with remote onboardings during Covid, has become landscape of developers spread across two offices, Berlin and Hamburg, and the internet. While we all value the freedom of being able to work from home, or the occasional Workation from under a palm tree, we sometimes lack the human connection with people outside of our teams. What’s a better way to fix that than an intense two-day deep dive into our common passion: tech.
What motivates us about hackathons?
Running an internal hackathon has become a yearly event at MOIA. We take two days to work on our own ideas with everyone who is interested. The ideas are related to MOIA in a way, but not necessarily to our product. Ideas in the past have included: improving our life at the office, improving collaboration, communication, data flows or something else. Over the years, we have realized that dedicating two days to playfully working on own ideas is worth it for the following reasons:
- During these two days we do not only drive cross-functional collaboration by mixing up given teams, but we also boost employee engagement by allowing people to pitch their own ideas.
- A hackathon is an opportunity to bring people from different departments (Tech, Product, UX Design, Central Functions) together, encouraging creativity and innovation while also driving continuous learning and preventing silo mentality.
The hackathon in general allows all participants to break free from their daily work routines, offering a chance to explore new ideas and challenge themselves in a dynamic, supportive environment. We basically complete almost an entire design sprint in two days.
To ensure people can really make space for this, we organized the event in mid-December, where teams have usually completed most of their yearly commitments and are more flexible in terms of time management.
Finally, for many of us, a hackathon is also a chance to practice presenting imperfect results and honing storytelling skills, as the focus is on experimentation and learning rather than perfection. And be ensured, the final presentations are usually the most fun part where teams manage greatly to entertain the audience with improvisation, storytelling or surprising fixes.
Frame and event structure
So, what did the hackathon look like specifically? One week prior to the event, we kicked it off with an idea pitch, where anyone could propose a project and announce a team, also asking for specific roles that were needed to achieve the proposed idea. Once the teams were set, we dove into two full days of intense hacking, with the energy building towards the final presentations, where each group shared their innovations and lessons learned.
From experience we knew that an on-site event would be most engaging and fun and that a similar energy cannot really build up in a hybrid or remote setup. While leaving the final decision up to each team, we encouraged everyone to gather at our office in Hamburg, enjoy some healthy catering during lunchtime and meet all team members in person. Spoiler: Most people did show up and the office was nice and busy and buzzing from creative energy!
What projects were worked on
This year we had 17 hackathon projects. We would like to provide a quick glimpse into 2 of them, to give you an idea of what a hackathon project could look like.
Mixed Reality Widget for VR glasses
Whereas Virtual Reality (VR) usually uses computer modelling to create a simulated digital environment, Mixed Reality (MR) brings together the physical and virtual world and lets them interact with each other. As the usage of such a setup could change how we interact with digital content in the future, one team decided to create a mixed reality MOIA widget for an Apple Vision Pro.
The widget shows your live trip status on a 3D map and allows friends or family to follow your trip on a widget which integrates into their Mixed Reality setup. The widget can be opened and placed somewhere in the room, so that your loved ones know when you arrive.
Milk-O-Matic
At the MOIA office we have a coffee machine that supports a lot of different hot beverages, some of which contain milk. For these the coffee machine draws milk from a carton from a mini fridge. The machine is not aware of the fill level though, so when the milk carton is almost empty the machine starts to sputter and gurgle the remaining milk. The idea of this project was to warn the user early. For this the team used a load sensor, a LED strip and a ESP8266 MCU, some soldering was also involved. And it actually worked!
In summary, it’s safe to say that everyone had a great time during the two hackathon days. As described, a multitude of various projects were created and people from different teams got together to work on them. People used technologies they hadn’t interacted with before, non-tech people created applications and techies got first-hand experience in product design and management.
It was also greatly beneficial for us, the organizers of the hackathon, as we needed to plan a whole event, including prizes, catering and the final presentation.
