We recently had our annual hackathon at Leap. As every year, it was a huge success! People had fun, and some amazing projects were presented at the end. Let me tell you how we do hackathons at Leap.

Being a software company, roughly 1/3rd of our employees are Software Engineers. However, the yearly hackathon is open for all employees. We basically let go of all rules and processes. For three days, everyone can work on whatever they like, and take any role they want in the project they’re working on. We encourage people to come up with ideas during the weeks preceding to the hackathon. Those ideas are shared on an internal wiki page. Apart from that page, there is no process. People can take inpsiration from that page. People can form teams around ideas from that page. But people can also come up with another idea last minute and just start working on that on their own.

Leap is a remote-first company. But for the hackathon, we encourage people to see if they can meet in person. Most engineers live in Europe, and gather in our office in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Most other people live in the US and Canada. They gathered in co-workingspaces, that were designated as “hackathon hubs”. And some people still chose to work from home, either because of personal preference, or because no hub was nearby.

I was lucky enough to be in the Utrecht office 2 of the 3 days. It’s amazing to see what happens when you let go of all rules. People that don’t work in the same team are teaming up for the hackathon. And although there is a bit of competition –prizes are to be won for the most useful, most creative and most insane hackathon projects– people working on different projects help each other with troubleshooting, or sharing ideas. It’s all a bit chaotic, but above all vibrant and exciting. People have fun together. People try new things, explore the boundaries of their abilities. Product managers are programming, engineers are designing, designers turn out to be great project leads.

So, a hackathon like this is great for the team. It helps with bonding, it is inspirational and fun. Those things alone make it worth doing. But there’s more! Every year, the hackathon projects brought the company a lot of insights, ideas for new features and even some almost finished features. Every year, a few of the hackathon projects were put on the roadmap to be finished off as an actual new feature in our product. Those were projects that might have never started if it weren’t for the hackathon. Other projects did not end up in the product directly, but got a discussion started, or gave us an insight that eventually led to some other initiative. And some “regular” work got done as well. Some people didn’t feel so creative, but found a lot of pride in implementing some long-standing feature requests, that otherwise would had to wait weeks or months before we would have found space for it on some team’s backlog.

You might think: what can you do in just three days? Well, it’s actually amazing what you can do in three days! No less than 16 projects were presented at the end of this hackathon. Of course there was a lot of AI-stuff this time, like different kinds of specialized chat bots. But also engineering tools, like a coding agent integrated into our CI/CD-pipeline or a tool to bootstrap a new service quickly –think of Maven archetypes on steroids, tailored to our tech stack. People presented experiments with geographic maps, UIs that were made more approachable by adding insightfull graphs and proofs of concept to try out a new tool.

I think hackathons are fantastic. They motivate people and at the same time bring a lot of innovation into the company. It’s a pity we do only one hackathon per year…