How to Run a Fully Remote Hackathon

We are proud to introduce Alooba’s first hackathon, which will be fully remote for our team of engineers, spread across 6 countries and 4 continents. In 2022, we are committed to running hackathons on a monthly basis. We aim to boost creativity and cooperation in our tech team and have fun while creating meaningful features for our clients.

Why monthly

This year apply a 90/10 split of our team’s workload. 90% of our time will be spent working on defined goals and day-to-day tasks. For the remaining 10%, we will focus on projects that aim at fostering creativity and team building, including hackathons. We believe that 2 full days make the optimal time for our engineers to ship a fully functional feature into production.

What are the rules?

We encourage all our engineers to participate in this fun initiative. We foster cooperation and creativity as well as one of our core values: make it happen. Our only rule is, all projects that get started need to be finished and live on the website at the end of the hackathon.

Our engineers are allowed to work on whatever project they may consider a value-added for our product from our customer’s perspective. They can use user testing videos and clients' feedback reports to get inspired about what can make an impact from our client’s perspectives. We also encourage all project initiatives that incentivise new learnings for our team.

What are the competing projects?

These are the 5 projects that were selected by our team of engineers to be completed during this hackathon:

1.File upload questions type in the question bank

File upload is extremely versatile and can be used by companies to request candidates create any type of file and upload it as part of the assessment. This will open up a huge potential for types of questions, such as creating visualizations, to building entire projects.

2.Comments section in the candidate results page

The comments section will allow users to:

Share their thoughts about specific candidates with others.
Leave notes for themselves and come back to them later.

3.Improve load time in the new pages

Instead of showing a loading screen to the user whenever they navigate, we will have a cached version of the data while the remaining data is fetched in the background. This will drastically improve the UX by reducing loading times between the pages to near-zero seconds after the pages have already loaded once.

4.Candidate session replay

Currently, when looking at the candidate results it's either they gave the right answer or not. Being able to see how the candidate answered the assessment will give clients extra insight into the candidate’s ability to tackle the problems they are presented with.

5.Display the history of a candidate’s assessments on the candidate's results page

The candidate results page will help our clients have all assessments taken by a candidate grouped into a single view. This also includes candidates that have taken assessments across different products (i.e. Alooba Assess and Alooba Growth).

How do we select the winner?

Once the event is over, we will be holding a demo day with our judges. Each engineer will have prepared a short 5-minute presentation to illustrate the new feature and its functionalities. Each month, we will invite between 2-3 different judges that will decide who the winner is. Judges can be either existing clients as well as relevant people in our industry or anyone who may be interested in participating and learning more about Alooba.

This will benefit both our existing customers, who can have a sneak peek at a new feature that may become available to them soon as well as prospective customers who can have a close look at our product, see our values, meet our team and get a sense of the quality of our work.

What will the prize be?

The winning project reward will be 1000 USD! We will allocate this sum each month as a prize for the team or individual that ships the winning feature to production.

….And of course, there will be pizza! What kind of hackathon would it be without pizza? In an unmatched logistical effort, we are organizing the world’s first-ever attempt to simultaneously deliver pizzas across 6 different locations in the world!

What’s next?