Clash Of Coders: How we do hackathon at WhitehatJr

Young minds learn on our platform and bring their ideas to life, by building apps. What innovation can the developers, who built this learning platform, do in 24 hours?  We had seen how exciting the student hackathons turn out every time, and so we, at WhitehatJr / Byju's Future School, had our first (internal) #hackathon in Aug'21.

TL;DR: How the event unfolded and led to innovation, challenges, team building, excitement, fresh projects, promotions and new systems.

Just like an extremely fast growing startup ( we became the fastest, to reach the scale and business of this size, that ever built in India), it was all about messy desktops, confusing office hours, rare jokes on conference calls and a monthly town hall that celebrated the success we took in our strides.

We were suddenly a team of more than 200 developers, where ideas would come from every direction and new systems were introduced every month (thanks to a very energetic product team). Let me take you through the roller coaster ride that Clash of Coders was.

Why > How > What

Growth at an exceptional pace means your projects are always skewed towards scaling initiatives. New courses were being launched, one after another; we had recently rebranded WhitehatJr international to Byju's Future School and a lot of fresh blood with aspirations of moonshots in our veins.

This aggravated the gap between engineering to make an impact at agile speed and trying to balance the roadmap with feasibility of innovation in product with packed targets and experiment lists.

Innovation. Business Potential. Practicality. Completeness of implementation.

This sounded exactly like the judging criteria for a hackathon.

And the word itself infused enthusiasm in teams which suddenly started shredding the confinement of assigned projects.

Planning

The leadership was looking just for this, not only from the business side but from technology and product as well.  Sponsors check.

Some teams were no strangers to hacking solutions on Friday and releasing the same night, so everyone was motivated to keep it a 24 hour event rather than any longer. Motivation check.

As always the business wanted to be a bigger contributor to the prize money and everyone was convinced to keep the potential and innovation of the projects as the biggest factors for deciding winners. Rewards check.

Tracks and threads - The Execution

Fortunately the entire development at WhitehatJr happens on cloud infrastructure, there are tens of dev environments. This made it easy for the DevOps and support team to make available required clusters and technology tools needed by the diverse ideas.

Karan (founder WhitehatJr) raised the curtain on hackathon at a townhall meeting, to the cheers of everyone. Ideas and requests of using cutting edge technologies started pouring and were responded to by the support group. Operations and business team members wanted to be part of this shiny new thing called hackathon, a request we could not incorporate.

Entire event coordination was led by our awesome Human Resources team, which added bling to the entire nerd outlook that follows hackathons. This hackathon was a first for some of them, and they wanted to do it perfectly.

We identified two major drivers and tracks towards the hackathon, first one was to have dedicated mentorship.

Mentorship is a cornerstone for any hackathon to be successful at every stage of the journey, from ideation, validation, development, presentation and impact.

Second one to motivate everyone's moonshot innovation with a patent sponsorship framework. This set the standard higher for everyone to come with surprisingly new perspectives.

Finalizing a platform, to run the event and have efficient management of registrations and stages with hackerrank, was a good decision. It gave us a ready framework to publish the event stages, team building, idea submission, evaluation criteria and idea/ project submission system. We could focus more on the innovation and impact of the event.

Events

Right after the curtain raiser, registrations started flooding, having 100 registrations 4 weeks before the hackathon was a positive pressure the spearheading committee needed to be prepared for the challenge of making the event streamlined.

Asking everyone to become a part of a team or build a team was a very difficult exercise. While the leaders would have wanted to have a diverse mix and many team members to be part of a team, there were a lot of participants that were apprehensive/ hesitative in joining another team. This is understandable as some would want to keep the idea from leaking out.

Every idea and team required a custom mentorship approach, and this was addressed by a mix of mentor panels that we built. Leaders from business, engineering, product, operations and analytics came together and made the time available for teams to run their idea thru experienced minds.

This helped shape up the crude ideas and substantiate the innovation that can be achieved.

Idea reviews happened on multiple fronts and coffee sessions with leaders were a big hit, it had a side effect of adding motivation and visibility of ideas that participants wanted to achieve. The coffee sessions earlier in the week nicely built up for the hack day.

Hack Day

Usually Thursdays are minor release days for all teams, but this one was special (no releases, yay !). Everyone had concluded their releases earlier on Tuesday (major release day) and one day of production monitoring and weighing for the hotfixes.

The hackathon was kicked off just before lunch time, every team was given free hand to create their AWS environment in the hackathon cluster.  After the first 3-4 hours when every team was ironing out their idea and finalizing their final submission and task distribution and last minute planning/ adaptation.

We introduced two 4-hour periods in the afternoon and evening for some guide drop-ins, assigning two guides from the guide panel to each team.

This was a great way to remind the teams about the practicality of ideas they can strive to present the next day.

Saying that these sessions shaped up a lot of ideas and polished with last minute shine, wherever there was doubt or idea was crude, would be an understatement.

After each feedback session with guidance, each team was able to get the reality check needed and also structure their stages of development in a 24-hour hackathon. A lot of these guides were going to be part of the judging panel for round 1 evaluations, so participants were able to run their idea and implementation on the scoring criteria.

We also captured some candid moments (and videos) when teams were discussing and members were in "flow" creating the hacks.

The Hacks

The diversity of ideas were amazing and teams were divergent from one to the other extreme. From teams of product managers trying to re-use existing engineering components, to teams that had only engineers coming with innovations outside of the current tech landscape at WhitehatJr. From teams of one member going solo, to teams having double digit members. From teams trying to target multiple ideas, to teams with single focus on one type of user (learners, teachers and operations are all customers for us).

There was a lot of interest around bots

We had ideas with voice bot, chat bot, bot management, guide bots and bot management as a platform. Not to be behind on the video bots ideation, some teams worked on making sense of the video (remember, the online classes is the new industry WhitehatJr had carved in Ed-Tech, the one hour of class experience is the top priority for us) and provide with gesture reading for variety of tech interventions like feedback capture and workflow automation.

Ideas ranging from "change the world" for online learners to make "each question a fun" for the kid made the talent evident in the team and it created a buzz in all engineering leaders.

Judging Rounds

We had more than 40 submissions, and had an appropriate plan for shortlisting 8 ideas which can be presented to the executive leadership. First round of evaluation was left to engineers, product and business leaders. We assigned 20 minutes for each idea to be presented and evaluated, but it soon became exhausting, you would always want to present the entire depth of idea as a participant and as a panelist one would have many questions.

After the first round, as much as we wanted to restrict to the top eight ideas, the ten panels (of two panelists each) there was a big discussion if we could identify only eight ideas.

We were unable to restrict the finalists to eight teams and decided to increase the top ideas to ten.

This would increase the final round by at least half an hour, where seven executive team members including CEO, COO, CTO, CLO and CBOs.

And The Winners

"Watch us move" won the hackathon with scoring cumulative highests in the combined criteria of Innovation, practicality, Completeness and Potential. The idea was about having video gesture capture and making the class delightful and driving student engagement in class. Interestingly they scored second overall on all four criteria, but were consistent and very balanced to address both innovation and business impact.

First runner up was "Gesture_rise" again a gesture reading idea that could make taking quizzes as easy as moving your hand. This idea scored highest on innovation, and shocked our judges with the impact that can be achieved by a one member team (!), yes, you read that right.

Second runner up award was split between two very interesting teams. "Bots with Dots" saw bots a need of hour and designed a platform for inducting and launching multiple bots with a framework, scoring highest on the Business Potential criterion. "Ode to Code" presented WhitehatJr on Voice with a shiny demo of running a Google home application that would do seamless registrations and trial class booking in seconds, no wonder it scored the highest on the Completeness/ Polish criterion.

The Impact

The work for engineering leaders was not over with the winners being announced, but just started. The expectations from the technology team shot up with business leaders tasting blood, so much innovation can be churned within a day!

We formulated a team of leaders to evaluate feasibility of ideas that can be taken up and made part of systems immediately.

The quiz feedback idea (Yin Yang Ya) , which fell short of winning the finale, was easiest to be introduced in the system and became the first idea to go live, immediately capturing interest of our younger students. The product tour idea which did not make to finale, Zo Acharya (acharya means teacher in Sanskrit), suddenly appeared the breakthrough our teacher training teams were looking for, the impact of the idea went multifold in post-hackathon meetings, with business and product team adding new use cases.

We also picked another idea, Hiro, that would be a mascot helping students be more effective with the dashboard panel and can initiate nudges to students, eliminating a lot of help queries and reminder calls. All of this reminded us how impactful some of the ideas can be even when not seen in their first impressions.

Ye Dil Maange More !

We want more and frequent hackathons, it was an unanimous decision from every side. It would be a crime to hold off such innovation and impactful ideas, plus a venue for all minds to come together shedding their daily baggage and achieving wonders 

We are contemplating having hackathons every quarter and at least one that would invite external participants to work alongside our own teams or with them. It is a platform for developing, having fun and generating new ideas.

Having had the entire growth of WhitehatJr, championing the product while carving out a new industry of online classes, in the time of pandemic (self-motivation and introduction of ideas while constantly experimenting) a hackathon made more sense.

The company was built on ideas and innovation with an appetite for hacking

and the remote working new-normal did not stop us from having our first hackathon online !