The talk covers some of my learnings & observations from organizing internal hackathons at a consulting company. This talk was given in one of the unconference sessions at DevRelCon Earth 2020 (https://2020.devrel.net/) on 30th July 2020.

1. Learnings from Organizing Internal
Hackathons
DevRelCon Earth 2020
Nithish Raghunandanan
@nithishr

2. About Me
● Former Developer Advocate
at KI labs
● Tons of Hackathon
experience
● Organize an Internal
Hackathon

3. Motivation
● Work on Topics outside
Projects
● Collaborate with People from
other teams
● Learn / Try something new

4. Organization
● 2 Days (24-28 Hours to Hack)
● Teams of 2 to 5
● No Theme
● Remote Teams from Lisbon
● Close to External Hackathons
● Demo to Judges (Internal &
External)

5. Resources
● Cloud Compute Resources (AWS,
GCP, Azure)
● Hardware (Raspberry Pi, Sensors,
etc)
● Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
● Ensure Network Compatibilities!

6. Ideation
● Wiki & Slack to Share / Discuss Ideas
● Pre Event Idea Pitching / Team Formation

7. Schedule
Day 1
08:30 Welcome & Introduction
09:00 Start Hacking
12:30 Lunch
19:00 Dinner
Hacking floor open all night
Day 2
Continue Hacking
13:00 - Hack Submission Deadline
13:00 - 14:00 Lunch
14:00 - 15:30 Demos
15:30 - 18:00 Internal Meeting
18:15 - 18:30 Hackathon Results
18:30 - 20:00 Dinner & Drinks

8. Judging
Criteria
● Technical Impressiveness
#wow_factor
● Polish #user_experience
● Novelty #surprise_us
● Demos #take_my_money
Details
Jury
● C-Levels from KI Group
● Friends from Local Tech
Ecosystem
● Audience

9. Figures
10-14 Teams
24-28 Hours
40-50 Participants
Munich + Lisbon

11. Beer Bot
● Slack bot to keep the
office hydrated
● Raspberry Pi + Camera
● Inventory & Alerts

12. What Garbage?
● Segregation of Waste
(Paper / Not)
● Raspberry Pi + Motors
● iOS App

13. Delivery Boi
● Auto Notification of
Packages
● Raspberry Pi + Camera
for OCR
● Slack Bot

14. BRAN
● Facial Recognition for
Office Door (Hodor)
● Raspberry Pi + Camera
● Deep learning & classical
machine learning
approaches

15. Ideas
● Solve Common Problems
● Office Essentials
● Use of Hardware
● Open Source / Future Work

16. Food & Drinks are Important

19. Demos
● Swag 😍
● Small Prizes

20. Outcomes
● Great feedback 📈
● Cool & Diverse Projects 😎
● Requests from Clients 💰
● Regular half yearly slot 🚀
● Participants had Fun! ✌
Working closer
with the wider
team.
Opportunity to
work on
something
different
Great
participation
and demos
It was lots of
fun! Loved it

22. References
Projects
● KI Hacks 1
● KI Hacks 2
Blog Post
Nithish Raghunandanan
hi@nithishr.com
@nithishr