Opentable Hackathon October 2020 - we came 2nd out of 34!!

Opentable held our 4th annual hackathon this week for 3 days Oct 13-15. 

Over 80 ideas were submitted and 34 ideas were actively worked on for the hackathon. Participants spanned all the Opentable offices including: San Francisco, New York, Mumbai, London,  Melbourne and where-ever we all are these days.

I've been involved in every Opentable hackathon since 2017 when I was on the #1 overall winning team "Invite Friends" (woot!), to 2019 when I helped organize that years hackathon to 2020 when I returned to being a participant on the "Personal Collections" hack.

The "Personal Collections" hack is to a hack add slick support in Opentable.com for users to create, maintain and share lists of their favorite restaurants for various occasions as well as find and follow others lists. We had a team of 6 people across London and San Francisco offices, 2 designers and 4 engineers. I believe you should use the hackathon as an opportunity to do something different. Different tech/business domain/teammates. Personal collections sounded interesting. I've always wanted to work with Mattia (his idea) and this was a great opportunity. So I joined the tea, Myself and another engineer were new to the consumer frontend codebase and it was a great learning experience. First it's a consumer app and I have only built restaurant apps. Second I've never worked with any of the other 5 people before. So it was fun to get to know the team. 

The consumer frontend codebase is a react app, uses redux and selectors and its own component library (but no typescript). Our hack reused over 9 common components including InteractiveMap, Modal, Button, Links, Pill and Card. We added a new page to the consumer app (see below). Given we had barely 2 days to build, we split up the work and I worked on the top left header above the left side list and the Share btn to share modal. Other teammates worked on the map and left side card list.

Gone are the early hack days of live demos. Now all submissions must be 3 minute videos and the standard of the videos was very high this year. Very slick productions with music and more. Thankfully our designers created a great video presentation that included the business case, a demo of the app we built (interactive map and list with sharing) and what remains to get it live. One nice aspect of being split over timezones was the London team could work on the hack while US team slept.

As we presented we got great feedback from peers in Slack for our hack idea and execution including

• "This is amazing. We need this now!"
• "Love this one. I have weird pinterest pages to help me track restaurants ive been to by cities. would def use this and share"
• "Love the map"
• "Woot! Love this."
• "This takes what we do with it to next level, great job."

Even though 2020 judging and presentations were completely remote I thought it worked even better than in person judging. As hack videos were played they were announced in the hackathon channel then everyone had the opportunity to comment and provide feedback (which they did). The hack event also periodically cut to a presenter who reported on what's happening in slack. A clever and entertaining way to fill time between videos.

Best of all, our hack was voted best of Europe, Middle East and Asia!

Even better, we came 2nd overall out of all 34 hack projects. Wow! This is a great achievement considering the competition was very strong, i could easily pick 10 hacks for the top 3.