“Innovation is the unrelenting drive to break the status quo and develop anew where few have dared to go.”

And we dared to go that extra mile in the 3rd edition of the annual 24-hour hackathon “HackDay” held on 4th February 2022. This year we broke the stereotype that only engineers can be a part of hack days - we saw not only the engineers hack their way through the night but also saw folks from the Product Growth and also QA team attempting to create magic over a 24hr time frame. This diversification not only brought about unique ideas but also provided a platform to witness and absorb the innovation and creativity others brought to the stage. In the end, we were all curious folks that were motivated to solve problems in their own ways whether it required you to code or not

This year, HackDay was conducted and performed completely online due to the ongoing 3rd wave but that didn’t stop the 18 teams and a total of 39 participants from ideating, iterating and building production-ready concepts. The presence of Hackday veterans didn’t stop the newbies from giving it their best shot - Success is doing what, where, when, with whom you want and that was exactly what we did this time around as well and we were all successful as the reward was that we all gained immense knowledge over the 24 hrs.

Separated by distance and united by the dire need for coffee, energy drinks and the discord team servers, the teams came through to demonstrate great collaboration, spirit and a willingness to learn.

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

Wu-ji-bi-fan - Jinu George

Microsite generator

• A feature that will allow us to generate microsites for Hub stores and bizgain businesses that do not have their own websites.
• The content, theme and layout of the sites are configurable for each store/business and are stored, indexed/identified by the route name. A common web application then renders the corresponding layout, theme and content dynamically by reading the stored info using the route.

R^5 - Rakshanda and Razi

Roimatic for Ecommerce

• Ezy is a digital advertising tool that helps small to medium e-commerce businesses to tap into the world of digital marketing.
• It comes with various intuitive and first in class features such as Automatic Product Sync, Smart Campaign Templates, Pre-made Creative Template, Audience Strategy selection and much more.
• The tool is crafted in such a way that even a user with little-to-no knowledge about digital marketing will find it Ezy. We boil down the process into 4 simple and Ezy steps - Select Channels -> Select Products -> Select Campaign Template -> Set budget and Launch

We overslept.. - Harsha, Izzy, Khumbar

TourX: Deltax Product Tour

• We created static and interactive product tours for the Deltax web app and Roimatic app. Tour can be started with a single click.
• It can also support multiple tours for a single feature. We also provided developers with an option to create a tour for any feature. It can make client onboarding easy.

Code Breakers - Ujjanth, Ajay, Utkarshini

Continuous Deployment for Services Dashboard

• The idea was to build a service management and health monitoring app that would allow developers to stop (safe stop and force stop), start and restart tasks/services using a web dashboard.
• The main intent behind this hack was to avoid RDPing to servers each time service has to be stopped before deploying and restarted after deploys. The dashboard allows users to fetch rolling log data for all services. It’s an interactive way to manage all the services running on DeltaX and allows seamless deployment of services.

ReWrite - Narendra Mohan

Build REST-ful API in place of WCF

• The idea is to replace our Core Task creation process which is currently being handled by WCF Web service.
• Tried replacing WCF Web service with REST API which is faster & lightweight

BetaY - Sonu, Ankit K, Afif

Site/Page Performance Monitoring using Chrome Lighthouse

• We created a WebPerformanceAnalyzer Service which periodically runs lighthouse analysis in the background and dumps data into our database.
• We generate a complete analysis report on HTML and store it in our DB.
• We display Statistics using different charts.

Llamas - Amrith Yerramilli

Creative production on the server-side.

• Our current creative product has a very good editor experience for designers. However, it also generates the final assets (images/video) in-browser (powered by web assembly) - and is somewhat slow and limited by the system.
• Rendering the assets on the server will mean that the creative production can happen in a background job - without depending on the user’s system.
• I implemented a nodejs API that renders the canvas animations and uses FFmpeg to encode the video.

Team Exception- Rohan, Ankit Singh and Arghadip

Bizgain live agent.

• Our hack is to add a live agent on bizgain to ease out the signup process for the local business.
• It has the text to speech functionality which speaks when you focus on the form input live that what input is accepted by that form and what is expected by us from a local business.

CallX/LeadX: Shriganesh, Tharif

Incoming Call Notifications

• The hack that we worked on was essentially pushing notification support for LeadX Web Portal.
• The problem that we tackled is this: On leads, whenever we received an incoming call from the lead, the team wouldn’t have any information about who is calling them.
• To solve this, we supported push notifications with relevant information of the lead whenever an incoming call is detected.

Next Team XD - Asim, Akshay D, Nikhil C, Ravi

DeltaX training app (LMS)

• The hack was called the Trainz, it’s a training app to help smoothen the internship experience for the onboarding and training of the engineering interns.
• This also helps to bring in all the roles like a buddy, module manager and intern into the same platform and also provide tools to help track progress during the entire internship program.

Tech Warriors - Vishnudevi, Prabhavati

Importing of widget and sheet at custom reports

• Support for importing of Widget or Sheet in custom reports. Custom Reports can have multiple sheets and multiple widgets.
• If we want two custom reports with multiple sheets and widgets as single reports / to need a few sheets or widgets from any of the custom reports. Manual creation of widgets/sheets same as other custom report widgets/sheets is time-consuming. Thus, we came up with support for importing widgets /sheets from any of the custom reports.
• So, we can select any number of Sheets/Widgets from the import popup to import those sheets/Widgets in the report.

GPT-3 - Akshay.S, Madhan, Inara

GPT-3 based Ad Copy Generator

• Automatic ad copy generation using GPT3.
• We as a team were able to automatically generate multiple ad copies by taking business descriptions and the promotional interest as input using OpenAI’s pre-trained GPT3 model.

WDF - Arun.K

Self Sign-up for LeadX + Enhancements

• The goal of this hack/product is to help the users generate leads from multiple platforms & manage them in one place with flexibility.
• The user should be able to perform everything from linking to managing on his own without anyone’s help. This’ll help up target different businesses of different sizes.

System Obsessed- Debanjan, Sagnick, Anushka

Designing a NEW cross-channel dashboard for DeltaX

• For the hack day, we tried working on an Automated Pacing Sheet which helps in reducing excessive daily manual calculations and maintains the Campaign hygiene and keeps a check on Pacing with Automated WhatsApp Alerts.

Proxy - Sid, Khyati K, Muskan K

DeltaX Hub for Hotel Chains, Streamline Sales process

• For this year’s hack day, we put together a system to streamline the sales process from tracking lead status to deal closure through the use of tools such as Notion for its relational database capabilities and sync with Google Sheets. The sales data would be shown on a Dashboard for a quick glance of overall sales intelligence and performance for each team member.

K10 - Ketan Jawahire

API BatchProcessor

• Modern web app/Mobile apps need data from multiple entities to be able to render UI components. In such scenarios, the client has multiple API calls just to load a single UI component.
• BatchProcessor endpoint allows you to pass multiple instructions in a single HTTP request & specify dependencies between related operations using a JSON path. Independent operations are processed in parallel. Dependent operations are processed sequentially. Once all operations are complete, a response is sent with the result of each operation.

Winners

With such a variety of hacks and ideas, our panel of judges had a tough time picking the winners. We had 18 teams (39 members) who pushed themselves to pull off miracles overnight!

• DeltaX - Most Impressive Hack - wu Ji bi fan - Microsite maker (Jinu)
• DeltaX - Most Production-Ready Hack - We Overslept.. - Product Tour (Harsha, Izzy, Khumbar)
  • honourable mention: Tech Warriors (Vishnudevi / Prabhavati)
• DeltaX - Most Potential Hack (#NoCode) - R5 - Ecommerce EZY (Rakshanda, Razi)
  • honorable mention: WDF - LeadX Self Signup (Arun)
• DeltaX - Dev Productivity - we couldn’t pick one, so both teams deserved this win :)
  • Code Breakers - Service Management Dashboard (Ujjanth, Ajay, Utkarshini)
  • 404: Team Not Found - Automate Env Setup (Ashwini, Rohit, Pranay)
• DeltaX - Participants Choice - Next Team XD (Akshay.D, Asim, Ravi, Nikhil)

Congratulations to all the winners and more power to each of the participants!

A special thank you to the judges to our awesome judges this year: Jaydeep Trivedi, Dhananjay Kabra and our secret judge Krishna HS

Closing Thoughts

The best part of the Hackathon was of course working on our ideas but we saw so many of these brilliant ideas that it made it super difficult to finalize on the winner - leading to a 1.5 hr wait. IT MOST DEFINITELY WAS WORTH ALL THE HARD WORK.

Let’s hear from a few folks who participated and their experiences :

• Razi Refi Rafeek: The 2022 Hackday was really exciting. I didn’t think we would pull off the hack. The idea we picked was a pretty big product with many moving parts. Honestly was surprised with the end result.

• Utkarshini Acharya: It was a fun experience, brainstorming potential approaches and ideas with my teammates and finally building the end product.

• Rohan Singh: Hackday 2022 was the first hackathon I ever participated in and it was awesome. Although I and my team does not have single clue what will do on hack day we still take part and had a lot of fun. Going all-nighter and coding IS FUN !!!

• Madhan Advani: It was really cool learning some new stuff along with Akshay. I was quite amazed by what the pre-trained model could generate on its own; ad copy generation being just one aspect of it. We are now trying to take it to live into our production environment.

• Sidhartha Menon: Coming from the Growth team it was super interesting to see how the engineering teams work together to bring our visions alive - but I had a really fun time pitching #nocode hack this year!

Until the next time, #OnwardsAndUpwards.