Cloudbeds Hackathon 2022

Engineers were eager to think outside the devbox at our first-ever Cloudbeds Hackathon, a friendly intramural competition to see who can build the most brilliant thing before the 24-hour clock runs out. Caveat: they have to be ideas with solid potential for our products or platform.

And they certainly were! Engineers came armed with great ideas, and coded like crazy. We declared the winners (and prizes) by popular vote, but every project used the same winning hack: creative collaboration. Here’s what some of our experts had to say about the big picture behind this break from the ordinary.

Was there anything that surprised you about Cloudbeds' first hackathon?

• I was surprised by the number of participants, the quality of projects, and of course I was pleasantly shocked by how the results were achieved in such a short time. I’m proud of my teammates. — Alyona Petrova, frontend engineer
• Every project demo was really good and high quality.  Everyone produced something really cool in one day! —Jared Annis, fullstack engineer
• When the engineers were left to their own resources, it was amazing to see the camaraderie and ideas that have been swirling around in their heads. —Aaron Ownbey, senior director of engineering

If you want to stay competitive in tech right now, what do you need to give your engineers?

• Aaron - Space. That's critical. You can't be pulled into meetings all day and get disrupted.
• Alyona - Give engineers the freedom to present anything they want, in area they want, and they can impress you.
• Jared - It sounds basic, but you really just have to give engineers cool projects to work on!

What next-gen tech are you most excited about?

• Jared - GRPC with server reflection. It makes integrating a client with the server really easy.
• Definitely real time data. —Lucas Hartridge, senior engineer
• Probably machine learning. Based on that we can create magic! —Kir Vorobiov, senior frontend engineer

What should companies do to help engineers build the very best products?

• Lucas - You have to clearly define your product requirements. Then you can achieve real engineer involvement in product, because now they understand the vision.
• Alyona - Companies should listen to engineers when they're mining optimization of a process. And that's what our company does, so I think we're in a good way!
• Kir - I think the company should be as open as possible about its plans, goals. From time to time, host events like hackathons in order to give employees the freedom to showcase their ideas.

Cloudbeds 2022