We kickstarted 2020 with a 24-hour hackathon hosted on 3rd Jan and I must say the ideas were downright crazy and brilliant. While the hackathon resulted in new product ideas, enhancements, and new solutions, we at DeltaX were more excited about what we learnt as part of this experience.

• Power of Constraints: It all started with the teams struggling to choose some of the ideas to take on and build a working prototype. Starting from scoping till execution the pace is really important and once you accept the constraints of time it feels even more powerful as you have to be prudent and creative at the same time. With 12 Teams working on 12 different products and delivering it in 24 Hours everyone embraced constraints.

• Power of Execution: We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”- Albert Einstein. In less than 24 hours in hand that is exactly the attitude that determines how we take up the challenges and how we solve our problems. Our Participants took this to the next level by challenging their daily problems to the challenges that were fascinating to them. Despite the chaos and short-lived nature of this hackathon, it forced participants to focus on issues and come up with innovative ways to address them.

• Power of Collaboration: When you have and end to end feature to be delivered in 24 hours one needs to work collaboratively. All teams showcased team work and it was evident from the results.

Teams

DxDMZ : Venkatesh Naidu, Shivam Kumar & Vignesh Prabhu

Voice assistants come in handy these days and wouldn’t it be awesome if we got to know about our dashboard info from a voice assistant without having to manually check the same. That is what we did, we made Alexa fetch details like campaign performance(based on clicks, impressions, cost and conversions) and wallet info. Alexa could eventually spread over our platform and support all the major functionalities.

LOL : Ranjith Shenoy & Jinu George

We set up an environment and deployment tool (Jenkins) that allows you to set up custom environments based on your feature branches. Both the environment and the deployment tool are docker based.

AK47 : Akshay Surve

NL2Viz - allowing users to ask questions in natural language and receive insights as intelligent graphs

The A Team : Akshay Devadiga & Amber Ramesh

Why gRPC based polyglot “Base Service”?

• Ideal for building a language-independent high-performance microservice architecture
• Communicates over HTTP 2.0,data compression (gRPC vs REST)
• Uses Protocol buffers for data serialization instead of XML and JSON
• Works well with huge amount of data.

TaskForce : Thrishul Shylesh , Priyatharshini Kumar & Meghana Desu

We build a project on GraphQL to reduce the number of endpoints being called in API. Now our platform is using REST API which will call multiple endpoints for getting any data that is needed, so we were trying to avoid that problem.

HyperDrive : Amrith Yerramilli

Ecommerce platform integration for Roimatic (Shopify / Magento)

Excalibur : Ankit Ojha, Asim Nath & Kishan

The Idea was to create a gamified dashboard for DeltaX Developers and QA, This means adding dashboards, leaderboards and achievements for statistics that we get from JIRA and BitBucket.We Added a concept of dynamic achievements and leaderboards that change every sprint, the statistics are present at a sprint level as well at all time, this makes it fair to people who have joined the company later.

One for All : Shriganesh PG, BakarAli Sunasara & Sheik Abdullah R.

Created a Bitbucket and Flock bot( BeeBee ) which has few features like

• If someone creates or approves a PR the author and reviewers get notified.
• If the author doesn’t have access to merge the PR they would have to comment and some checks would be done before merge.

404👀 : Ashwini Gupta, Swajeet Singh & Sunny Wadhwani

Extensible Search powered by Elasticsearch so that we can search anything on the platform. Events like Report Template Creation, Report Publish & Media Plan creation are pushed to Elasticsearch

MissingAds : Narendra Mohan

Implemented AdWords Query Language (AWQL) to find missing ads that didn’t got synced.

Jarvis : Ketan Jawahire

Fact tables per engine and Created a Tik-Tok SDK for DeltaX.

Blaze : Ayaz Siddiqui

I wrote BDD test using cucumber for Selenium test for login page of DeltaX.

Winners

And the winners:

DeltaX - Most Impressive: Hack - LOL

DeltaX - Most Production: Ready Hack - 404👀

Most Fun Hack (based on participants poll): Excalibur

DeltaX Potential Hack - DxDMZ

Closing Thoughts

Here are some thoughts from the participants:

Amrith Y: The non-stop focussed brain activity during a hack is a definite high! You go through a series of ups and downs in a short time - which lets you stay put towards your idea.

Shriganesh PG: First-time experience with a near 24-hour hackathon. I had fun but exhausted towards the end.

Shivam K: It feels good when your competitors help you and guide you. It was a good time that we can have. I learned and implemented many things that i also couldn’t think of in 24 Hours.

Akshay Surve: I’ve participated in hackathons before and I would personally rate the technical depth and breath of the hacks as top notch. Pumped and humbled to be in this company.

We had a good mix of hackathon veterans and first timers. Almost all participants pulled an all-nighter and cheered each other as they presented their hacks to the judges. What matters the most is that everyone played to the spirit of the hackathon and made it a success. Look forward to the next edition, till then #OnwardsAndUpwards.