Internal hackathons are a powerful way to let your teams explore ideas and work together on something fun besides the same old stuff for work. Maybe they want to build something brand new, maybe they want to knock out things that are on the backlog that never get prioritized, or maybe they want to work on something fun but completely unrelated to work. It’s just a great way to let your team exercise their creativity in a way that they might not always be able to when they are going about their daily responsibilities.

Non-coding: My Time at Fairwinds

During my time at Fairwinds, a managed Kubernetes provider and open source contributor to the K8s ecosystem, they conducted a really fun hackathon. They regularly did “tech debt” sprints each quarter which I thought was a fantastic idea and I wish more teams did it, but the hackathon was a chance to do something completely different. The team I was on didn’t even do a coding project. We made a spoof song of “Come On Eileen” titled “Kubernetes”. The rest of the team did a fantastic job with the music and the lyrics (shoutout to Robert Brennan for his skills on the recorder). I helped by making a adding motion tracked logos to the original music video. It was just a fun experience brought us together and let us have fun and be creative.

PostHog’s Recent-ish Blog Post

One of the startups I really admire is PostHog and in researching the content of this post I came across one of their posts from April of this year. The thing I think stood out to me the most was that they turned hackathon projects directly into shipped features that have driven incredible growth for them. One of their most popular features is Session Replay and it was created in a hackathon. The thing about it is that rather than spend a lot of time on a PRD and countless meetings, the hackathon allows someone to create the proof of concept instead. That proof of concept is powerful because it’s figuratively “tangible”. I recommend reading their post for more details, but it seems to me like PostHog does a great job of empowering everyone at the org to build things during hackathons that let’s them explore ideas that can even make it into production.

GitKraken’s Origin Story

GitKraken has a similar history of internal hackathons, but what you might not realize is that GitKraken itself was born in a hackathon. The original company was Axosoft and still technically is on paper. Axosoft’s main product at the time was an early Trello competitor called Glo Boards. But, while working day to day on the main product, the team realized that git was kind of a hassle to work with for anything more complicated than the basics. During an internal hackathon, an early version of GitKraken was born. It has changed significantly since then, but the entire company rallied around this new tool that improved the developer experience of anyone working with git.

The Inspiration Behind Kepler

Kepler, our newest product, wasn’t built during the hackathon. But, a couple teams built projects that can be thought of as early inspiration for Kepler:

• Agent Activity Monitor: tracks AI coding agent activity across all repositories and tools. This system provides real-time visibility into what agents are doing, their progress, and their impact on codebases
• GitKraken Threads: a unified monitoring and analysis platform that weaves together AI assistant conversations and Git commit history into organized, searchable threads.

With there powers combined, we had enough validation that these ideas solved real problems. We just needed to package them up into a proper product. If you’d like to know more, we have an entire series of videos introducing the product and it’s features:

1. What is Kepler?
2. Starting a task
3. UI Basics
4. The Agent Graph
5. Actions
6. Start from Backlog
7. Bring Any Agent or Model

Facebook, Microsoft, and More: Oh My!

In the past, similar articles about internal hackathons love to mention the most prominent examples of Facebook, Microsoft, and other companies like Capital One and Hasbro. They are powerful stories and can serve as inspiration. But, it can seem like hackathons are only for the largest corporations. My goal with this post is to inspire smaller companies and startups alike to give it a try. It might just change the trajectory of the entire business in a major way.