An exciting look at the highlights from RevenueCat’s Hackathon 2022

One of our core values at RevenueCat is Always Be Shipping. It’s pretty self-explanatory, but it’s often easier said than done. As a company scales, it’s not uncommon for things to move slower and for shipping to take a backseat to multi-stage discussions around minutia. 

As we continue to grow as a team and build upon our product, it’s imperative that we keep a strong focus on moving quickly and shipping high-quality work, both to keep improving our product and to maintain our internal culture of shipping. 

In Q4 of 2022, we hosted our first team-wide hackathon. The hackathon was a chance to flex our ABS muscle in a slightly different way, work on some different types of projects outside of our normal scope of work, and collaborate with team members we may not work with in our typical day to day. 

How we ran our Hackathon

Running a Hackathon with a fully remote team is an interesting challenge because it involves a lot of coordination on the part of the team members themselves, but our team was very much up to the challenge. We had a spreadsheet full of project ideas and lots of enthusiasm leading up to the 2 day event and at the end of the week, the results were better than we could have imagined. 

To keep the hackathon in alignment with our company norms, we ran most of the ceremonies like demos and voting asynchronously, but we did have a kick-off call to get everyone hyped up the day before the hacking began.

At the end of the two days, we had 15 project demos submitted to watch and vote on, ranging from aspirational POCs to internal process updates to new product features that were shipped within the week. It was so much fun to see every one’s excitement around their project and we were really thrilled by the diversity of projects that teams tackled. 

We’ve highlighted a few of the projects below — check them out to see some of the amazing work our team knocked out in a quick 48 hours!

Project highlights

Team DarkMode — Josh, Franco, Jan

Team DarkMode introduced a native dark mode display option into our dashboard. For all you folks who like working in the dark, this one’s for you! 

DBT Docs — Baran and Nicola

Two of our team members worked on DBT Docs, which is a website that automatically generates documentation for our internal analytics transformation project.

Improved Metrics System — Mario

To help support our metrics analytics, Mario tackled an upgrade to our system for displaying key metrics so we can store data for a longer time period for better and easier analysis.

ETL Deliveries — Jesus, Tina, Fon

ETL Deliveries was a project to display data export logs directly on a customer’s dashboard. This helps customers better understand the status of their data exports and helps our team better troubleshoot with customers as needed. 

Documentation Snippets on the Support Form — Sharif and Lauren

This project helped enhance our Support processes by integrating some of our documentation directly into the Support form to help customers more quickly resolve their issues. Our team has continued to add onto this since its initial release and it’s been exciting to see how it’s helped make customers’ lives easier.

2023: The Year of Shipping

The hackathon showed us just how much our team can accomplish when we’re focused and reaffirmed that the Always Be Shipping mindset is still very much a part of how we operate at our core. The event gave our teams a boost of inspiration and creativity and we’re keeping this same focus and enthusiasm as we move forward in 2023, which has officially been dubbed “The Year of Shipping” here at RevenueCat.