The “Mobile” Hackathon

Last year’s Caplin 24 hour HTML5 Hackathon was such a success that we’ve decided it’s high time for another!

Tomorrow at 3 o’clock sharp our Mobile Hackathon will kick off and our engineers will have 24 hours to form teams, plan, design and produce some completely bespoke applications which can be added to software.

What’s a Hackathon?

While we encourage our developers to take developer days to hone their skills or investigate ideas they have, the Hackdays provide a more structured environment with the focus of producing something that can be implemented as a Caplin feature.  We have found that the giving our developers some time to form teams and play around with some concepts they have been thinking about really drives innovation. Last year our engineers came up with some really cool ideas based on some of the cutting edge HTML5 features, a few of which have already been integrated into our products, and with the large growth we have seen in the mobile market we expect the same from this year’s Hackathon.

The Rules

  • Engineers can organise themselves into teams of up to 3.
  • The application must have something to do with mobile computing.
  • Development starts at 15:00 on Thursday the 29th of September.  No coding is allowed before this although we encourage our developers to have a plan ahead of time.
  • Pizza will be ordered for 20:00 for those hungry engineers who are going to be developing late into the night.
  • From 16:00 the next day each of the teams will have 10 minutes to present what they have developed to the whole company.
  • The winning entry must represent something that can genuinely be added into our products. However there will also be a runner-up spot for the most innovative use of mobile features, which don’t necessarily need to fit immediately into a product.
  • Three judges (our CEO, CTO and CCO) will be responsible for determining the winning entry and the runners up

Prizes!

While of course hard work is its own reward, to spice up the competition there are prizes lined up for the winning team and runners up plus the even bigger incentive that the winning feature will be added to our product set! Other features developed may also be included in the product at the discretion of the management team. Given last year’s successes, we’re expecting very big things from our teams. We’ll keep you posted!

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