Hacketse XIII: Sharing the Trophy...Again!

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Head of Product Marketing
5 min read /

The K15t Hacketse always promises to produce awesome projects – and occasionally a surprise or two. If you're unfamiliar with the event, the Hacketse is our in-house, 24-hour hackathon which we host three times a year, offering employees a day to tap into their creative and innovative side and bring new ideas to life. 

This round, we saw everything from sophisticated AI bots to a self-proclaimed 'Total Car Crash' of a project, but it's all in good Hacketse fun. Our 13th Hacketse ended in a tie, with two equally impressive projects stealing the show. Read on for a brief recap of everyone's favorite K15t event: 

Time Well-Spent 

The Hacketse is the perfect time to work on practical K15t projects, whether that means finding unique use cases for our apps, implementing new features based on customer requests, or simply improving organizational processes. This round, we saw a few teams put their time to good use in moving the company forward: 

  • Scroll Viewport Theme Factory: Scroll Viewport is a powerful app for delivering Confluence content to the web as help centers or websites of all kinds. As an app geared toward technical users, getting started can seem a bit complicated. To improve onboarding, Steffen and Egor built a few Scroll Viewport themes to help beginners get a head start. Current users – stay tuned! We're planning to share these new themes via our Scroll Viewport Developer Google Group soon. 
  • Documania: K15t uses Confluence to document all of our internal processes, and like every good wiki, it sometimes needs a facelift. Our office team used their Hacketse time to 'pimp' the K15t intranet space by cleaning up, restructuring, and translating company documentation. The result makes it easy to find information about K15t events, operations, HR policies, and our employee handbook. 

You Win Some, You Lose Some, You Learn Some

Developing new projects isn't a linear process, nor does it always work neatly into a 24-hour timeframe. Steve and Lena learned this lesson when they teamed up to build a 'fancy' Confluence page tree, one that would improve the overview of page content within a tree, making it easy to find information on long pages like tutorials and how-to's.

Lena and Steve working on a Fancy Confluence Page Tree.

Sadly, unforeseen technical hurdles and the time limitations meant the project couldn't be completed. Although it was dubbed a 'Car Crash' of a project, Lena and Steve were able to share some lessons learned about defining requirements, setting realistic expectations, and maybe avoiding a Friday the 13th deadline. The good news? This awesome project idea will be filed away for another Hacketse day.

Sharing the Trophy: Chotu & Confluence Shell 

Chotu: One Bot to Rule Them All

The defending Hacketse champion, Anshuman, was back this round with a new team and an equally awesome Hacketse idea. Together with Tom W. and Behrouz, this trio tried their hand at building an AI-powered chat bot to help our website visitors and customers find answers to their questions. Chotu, the equivalent of 'Santa's Little Helper' in Hindi, is a sophisticated chat bot that can have conversations in natural language and answer questions about our app, Backbone Issue Sync for Jira, on topics ranging from pricing to getting started.

A live demo of a conversation with Chotu was enough to impress the audience and tally enough votes to share the crown. 

Hacketse champions, Tom and Dash

Confluence Shell

Inspired by a unix shell, Confluence shell is an in-browser commandline built to automate boring, repetitive tasks in Confluence – or Atlassian apps in general. Thomas H. built this shell to support actions like chaining tasks and piping output of one task to the next. 

Without getting too technical, Thomas showed us a winning demo of how the shell could be used to automatically create a Confluence page, add a page label, and even delete a page with just a few simple commands. See for yourself: 

Be the Next Hacketse Champion

Think you have what it takes to win the next trophy? Hacketse XIV will be held this December, and we're always looking for great talent to join our growing team in Stuttgart, Germany. 

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