Hackathon at Redfin

Four engineers. Four days. One product.

During my four-month internship at Redfin, I had the opportunity to participate in one of our semiannual hackathons. The goal was simple: Be creative, have fun, and build something useful.

I was very excited to fly down to our San Francisco office with the rest of the engineers from the Seattle office and work with a team of engineers I hadn’t worked with before. We decided to develop a web interface for our in-house event-tracking tool, freeing us from the need to write SQL queries any time we wanted to learn something about how our customers use our products. Given the freedom to use any technology we desired, we decided to try something new on the front-end and build it with React.js, a JavaScript library that none of us had prior experience with.

Then the coding began and we started our race against the clock. It wasn’t long before things started breaking unexpectedly — but that didn’t discourage us. We put our heads together and tackled the challenges that arose while learning new things from each other in the process.

One of the 17 teams participating in the hackathon.

The hackathon was four days long, but we were encouraged to code only during the day. The evenings consisted of social activities, such as bowling, trivia and playing board games. During these events, I was able to mix and mingle with many members of the San Francisco office with whom I had only interacted online before. It was quite a magical moment to be able to put faces to all the names I was familiar with.

Bowling night.

Winners of the trivia challenge. (I wish I was in the photo! :p)

Serious board-game business.

The last few hours of the hackathon were hectic. Every team had their eyes glued to their screens as they frantically tried to fix the last few bugs. The presentations were set up in a science-fair style. The members of each team took turns presenting their products, giving others the chance to roam around and see what other teams had built.

That’s me in the red shirt presenting our product to other teams.

As I walked around and visited each booth, I was amazed at what some teams were able to accomplish. A few products managed to improve our internal tools and codebase, whereas others implemented cool new features for our customers. Each person was given a sheet of paper to vote for the most impressive product in four categories:

• “Ship It — Now!”
• Most Impressive Accomplishment
• Coolest Demo
• Best Overall

As I reflect back on the hackathon, I realize we made significant achievements. Four teams have already shipped their products to our production environment, some of which include improved dev tools and a refactoring of the code base.

What’s even more rewarding is the creativity it fostered among developers. At the hackathon, developers were encouraged to design and create their own products, allowing them to step out of their comfort zone and try something crazy.

It is often these crazy ideas that lead to remarkable products.