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Life at Gigs

Hackathon: What we built in 24 hours in Portugal

Tilly Michell

Nov 20, 2024

5 min

A few weeks ago, the team gathered in Monte Real, Portugal, for Gigs Republic: our bi-annual company offsite. 

Against a stunning autumnal backdrop and with a seemingly endless supply of Pasteis de Nata, the team found inspiration in strategy sessions, sharpened their skills in workshops, and put their heads together to tackle some of our most pressing challenges at the hackathon.  

Hackathons are a chance for Gigsters to team up and bring new projects to life in a single day. Anyone can pitch an idea (or several), form a team, and start building. 

The theme for this hackathon was Scaling Company Processes and Removing Friction. 

Here are the winning hacks!

Hack of the Republic: Dashboard Inbox

This hack gives Gigs customers the actionable insight they need, when they need it. 

The team built an inbox system for Dashboard—Gigs’ connectivity cockpit. When an important event happens, such as a failed payment or declined porting, customers will get a message straight to their in-app mailbox. Customers can pick which events they want to track and easily stay on top of what matters.  

“Inbox solves real customer needs. It required cross-functional collaboration with product, infrastructure, design, frontend and backend work. It had a scope that was both narrow and well defined enough that it could be made in a single day of work, leveraging our existing infrastructure.” Marcelo Pereira, Engineering Team Lead 

Most creative hack: Data-Yoda

Data-Yoda will give Gigsters more visibility of core business metrics.

The team built a Slackbot which automatically sends a weekly data report for key KPIs.

“We built a summary table of core metrics using dbt in Bigquery. Make, a no-code tool, is able to fetch this table and we then pass it to our Enterprise OpenAI account. Then, OpenAI analyzes the data and, based on a predefined summary, returns the weekly report. This hack will expose more Gigsters to our core metrics, their changes, and the customers that drive those changes.” Chris Brandenburg, Head of Data

Most impactful hack: Concierge for Support Processes without APIs

This hack frees up valuable company resources by automating manual support processes.

Some support tasks involve complex steps like logging into Slack, dashboards, Intercom, Linear, and external vendor portals. The team streamlined these processes by consolidating them into a single login through internal admin tools. 

“One of the key challenges we faced was designing the system to replicate user actions across various platforms safely and reliably. To achieve this, we leveraged Playwright for browser automation, which allowed us to observe processes and capture CSS selectors as actions were performed, while ensuring robust data security. This solution will streamline support workflows and help us deliver even faster response times to customers.” Amanda Hale, Support Engineer 

Best execution: Gigs Short Links

Short Links will make life easier for the Gigs team when sharing links internally.

The team built a URL shortener that makes it easy to memorize internal links to important pages. 

“We had to decide whether to use an external service, build our own, or use an Open Source solution. After finding an interesting candidate project, we went with the latter. This will make it easier and more pleasant to share important, memorable links within the company.” Piotr Domagalski, Senior Backend Engineer 

Congratulations to all our winners, and a huge thanks to everyone who took part. Together, we overcame hurdles, learnt from our mistakes, and made some magic!  

Want to join us at the next Gigs hackathon? We’d love to see you there. Take a look at our open roles.

Tilly Michell

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