“Scientists investigate that which already is; Engineers create that which has never been.” - Albert Einstein

As engineers, our utlimate goal is to solve problems creatively using technology. And what’s a better platform than a hackathon to identify problems and attempt to tackle it. On January 8th, 2021, we held the second edition of the annual 24 hour hackathon “Hackday” and it was an ebullient start to 2021. This year, we had a plethora of ideas and this eventually resulted in innovative solutions from all participating teams. Many teams identified and tackled existing problems while some enhanced existing solutions to work more efficiently. A few teams “hacked” just for fun while showcasing the potential of certain technologies and ideas. All in all, it was a very impressive hackathon with outstanding results.

However, this year, Hackday had a twist. It was conducted and performed completely online due to the ongoing pandemic. Lockdowns and WFH restrictions did not stop us from conducting Hackday with the same spirit as last years. Hackday 2021 was held on Discord. Previously, we had created a virtual office on Discord, having voice channels representing physical locations of the DeltaX office space. With this virtual setup, one could “go to office” and “sit at his desk”. You could seamlessly “move around” and “meet your friends”. For Hackday, we added additional voice channels for each participating teams. During the hack, you could move around to different teams and interact with them. There was also a channel dedicated to music so that people could jam while they hacked.

Although separated by distance but connected through the power of the internet, the teams showed great teamwork and willpower to complete the hack. With a small time duration of 24 and with ideas as big as Goliath, the participants executed their hacks with speed and precision.

Let’s see what the participating teams built in 24 hours and what they say about their hacks:

DXLel - Ranjith Shenoy and Utkarshini Acharya

Creative Builder as an NPM Dependency

Make creative builder platform agnostic and a separate product by itself which is not bound to either Roimatic or DX Web. This decouples it development and releases from Roimatic. This in turn helps Roimatic to only include it as part of it when needed (web app) and exclude it when not needed (mobile app). To achieve this, a private npm registry was setup using verdaccio and docker; followed by setting up a separate repository for creative builder. All code related to creative builder was then moved to the new repository and any dependency on Roimatic was elimated and data such as BP Id was accepted as props to the creative builder. The next steps for the hack would be to publish creative builder as a package to verdaccio.

Dae - Amrith Yerramilli and Meghana Desu

Dockerized services with orchestration

The idea was to Containerize + Orchestrate a “.net core service” to enable DevOps Ease/ Resilience/ High Availability / High Scalability

• Created a swarm cluster with two nodes & containerized TwitterDataService
• docker stack deploy publishes the service on swarm nodes. docker service scale TwitterDataService=5 to scale out the service across multiple nodes.
• Enabled Jenkins to build + publish the container images

Blitz Squad - Aadith Menon, Akshay Devadiga and Vignesh Prabhu

Personal manager/ToDo prioritization app with flock integration

We built a flexible personal/work management app with pick and use features functionality. It helps manage your day by prioritizing tasks based on priority, difficulty and estimated duration. Also provides useful insights about when you’re most efficient during the day.

&nbsp - Ajay Umakanth, S Pruthvi Raj and Shankar Anbalagan

DevOps + ChatOps - Automated Swaps and Control Dashboard for Services

Our hack is an attempt at automating two tasks that are being performed mannually by the DeltaX engineering team - WebApp Swaps and Service start and stop. We automated swap by creating a Jenkins pipeline and a swap server. This new pipeline provides an interactive input for the user to choose to swap or not. We also created a dashboard to control running status of services. Both these are integrated with flock for notifications.

Deku - Shree Ganesh and Ujjanth Arhan

LeadX Lead Search

We developed a search option on LeadX mobile app and portal. We achieved most of what was planned for the hack day, and had fun building it. Handling some of the edge cases in the query builder, as well as making the UI interactions useable were challenging, and that’s what made the hack interesting for us.

Ctrl Alt Code - Thrishul Shylesh and Priyatharshini Kumar

Heatmap analysis of application usage

Used to analyze traffic data in our platform. Understand how users are really experiencing our site without drowning in numbers. Knowing how the Users Interact with the platform will help with improving the UI to make the User Experience better and more efficient

PPG - Hansini Raj and Ranjitha Yerramilli

AM Dashboard/Infographics tool

A one stop solution for all client related insights like account summary, critical alerts, monitoring and overall health.

RMR - Ratheesh MR

DeltaX UI theme modernization

I worked on modernizing DeltaX UI theme. Worked solo on upgrading the visuals of DeltaX app and make it feel more ‘new’. My mouse gave up on me while working and so I could only finish the mock for a single page. Nevertheless it was fun to go through different UI ideas and try and figure out which may suit well with the app.

RRR - Razi Refi Rafeek

OfficeX

A One-Stop-Shop for all your WFH needs. No more switching between Flock-Discord-Gmail-Dropbox. Features Include:

• Messaging / File Sharing
• Voice-com like discord
• Quick Google Meet Hosting
• Gmail integration
• Dropbox integration
• Log and monitor Work hours (This one is for the Bosses)

This concept was just me ‘Hacking’ into an idea that I had during the lockdown.

P.S.- All the characters in the above screenshot is totally fictional, any resemblance to people in the real world is purely coincidental

404:Team Not Found - Ashwini Gupta, Swajeet Singh and Sunny Wadhwani

DeltaX Chatbot

Bots provide an experience that feels less like using a computer and more like dealing with a person - or at least an intelligent robot. A bot can be thought of as a web application that has a conversational interface. Our Bot can answer query like

• How to create new media plan
• Report expiring in next 10 day

User can interact with the bot to get help and create support requests if needed. Main components are bot-framework, LUIS, vue-botui, Direct Line Client on DeltaX Api.

Team Add-ON - Akshay Surve, Krishna HS, Yendru Chaitanya Sai Chandu

Google sheet plug-in to pull queries for DeltaX

1. Import ad hoc report data from DeltaX directly from Google sheet
2. Configure up to 10 data sets across sheets and keep them up to date automatically
3. Quickly get started by using your google account to login to DeltaX

Yet Another Team - Asim Nath, Arun Karunanithi and Ravi Nath Yadav

Awesome hiring portal on top of G-Suite/Trello/etc

Our hack was about an integrated hiring portal for DeltaX. It was mainly concentrated on third party integrations of the various tools into one place reducing the efforts by devs.

DXLul - Jinu George, Tharif Ansari and Indira Moparthi

Roimatic Storybook setup

Involved the initial setup/configuration of storybook for roimatic app, which facilitates the following:

1. Isolated development of common components in a separate repo
2. Maintain UI consistency by enabling visual collaboration of UI component design between the developer and the product team

Tu tatti hai kya - Ankit Ojha, Shashikant S, Pranay Malusare

Office Virtual Tour

Created a virtual tour of office where people could enter and move around office like in a game, the idea was to include proximity chat and some fun games too but time didn’t allow for it.

Winners

With hacks as brilliant as these, our panel of judges would have surely had a tough time deciding the winners. Nevertheless, here are one’s who stood out.

• Most Impressive Hack - PPG (Hansini Raj and Ranjitha Yerramilli)
• Most Production Ready Hack - &nbsp (Ajay Umakanth, S Pruthvi Raj, Shankar Anbalagan)
• Most Impactful Hack - DXLul (Jinu George, Tharif Ansari, Indira Moparthi)
• Most Fun Hack (based on popular vote) - Tu tatti hai kya (Ankit Ojha, Shashikanth S, Pranay Malusare)

Congratulations to all the winners!!

A special thanks to the amazing panel of judges - Dhananjay Kabra, Taher Chhabra, Priyank Yadav and Rohith PR

Closing Thoughts

Similar to last year, this hackathon had a mixture of veterans and ametures. We even had the interns participating in this hackathon (and they all won!).

Let’s hear from some participants and their experiences:

• Akshay Surve : A fully remote hackathon comes with it’s own challenges - hence it was amazing to see how teams adapted to it and eventually executed some some mind blowing hacks.

• Ujjanth Arhan : The brain storming, understanding ideas, jumping from one team conversations to another and coding till the next leaves you half dead but the fun and experience you have is definitely worth the effort XD

• Ajay Umakanth : The hackday that was organised was a fun learning experience that challenged and tested us as to how muchx we can accomplish within 24 hours. This actually helped us look into our true potential, and more over it was a nice break from our daily routine.

• Tharif Ansari : ‘Hackday 2021’ was the first hackathon in which I ever participated and it was such an amazing experience. I got a chance to learn lot of new things in a shorter duration during the hackathon moreover it was super fun to be awake whole night and complete the hack. A special mention to my teammates Jinu and Indhu without them ‘Hackday 2021’ would not have been this much fun for me.

• Pranay M : 24 hrs of coding and learning new tech on the Hackday 2021 was a fun experience . The day didn’t just help me learn tech but also bond with my teammates more and learn to handle scenarios with patience and get smart solution to serious problem. In all Hackday was one of the best and unforgettable experiences of my life.

Hackday 2021 was an incredible success. We saw a variety of ideas and innovative solutions. The learning experience was unparalleled. Accompanied with flasks of coffee, cans of Red Bull and buckets of ice cream (coffee flavoured :P), we tirelessly completed our hacks. We are really eager to see what the next Hackday has in store for us. But until then #OnwardsAndUpwards.