• Fixing

  • That piece of code that is just disgusting and a pain to use.

  • That workflow that drives you nuts but nobody's ever sat down to improve it.

• Learning

  • That language or framework that you think will make your work easier but aren't sure.

  • Learning about different parts of our stack.

  • Learning something that is beneficial to your career/edX that is non-code related.

    • Culture hacking +1

    • Personal education +1

• Experimenting

  • With how you build

  • With what you build

  • With who you work with

  • With who you build for (maybe Support or the PCs or other devs?)

  • Make a V0 of a feature that you're going to throw away.

Un-Goals of Hackathons

• Doing sprint work as your hackathon project

• Doing no work

How it's different than sprint work

• doesn't have to be off a backlog

  • or maybe it's somewhere in the middle of the backlog and you want to do it NOW

• can work with folks from other teams

  • or by yourself

• you are in charge 

Sparking an idea

• Is there a tool we already use that you could connect to another tool we already use?

  • consider Slack, Jira, github, Travis, Splunk, New Relic...

• Is there data you already have access to, that you could use to drive something interesting?

  • Check out our data warehouse: Snowflake

    • It has a copy of all our prod data and a visualization tool built in!

• Is there an external API you're interested in poking around in?

  • Checkout Open edX API for some ideas of what you have access to.

  • other common open APIs-- Google Search etc.

• Are there PCs or Support folks whose workflows could be improved?

  • The Current support tool MFE came out of a hackathon to make supports life easier by pulling all the data they need into one place!

  • What are manual processes at edx that could be automated?

Tips

• consider getting devstack set up before hackathon starts!