Awesome that you are considering organizing a Spryker Developer Hackathon!

After witnessing some great Spryker Hackathons organized by Spryker itself and/or partner-led hackathons by TOWA (with participation from other partners like Valantic, Diva-e, Marmalade, NFQ and Viabirds) you might be considering organizing a Spryker hackathon yourself as well.

We got you covered!

Goals

The goal of your hackathon is to have Spryker developers form project groups and deliver working code or a proof-of-concept at the end. As a (quite significant) additional benefit, participants also get to socialize, meet other developers, get inspired and learn new things.

Theme

A theme is optional, but can help set the tone and attract a specific audience to your event. Given that your hackathon is for Spryker developers, ensure the theme or challenge you select (if any) is relevant and interesting to them. It should inspire and motivate participants, and result in creative and innovative projects. You have the freedom to choose any theme, as long as it is engaging for Spryker developers.

Examples of previous themes:

• Spryker Oryx Framework
• “The one thing”: Double your development speed!

Logistics

Considering you are planning to host a physical event, selecting an appropriate venue is crucial. Ensure the venue is spacious enough to accommodate all participants, with reliable internet connection and enough power sources for all devices.

For a hackathon that lasts for 1-3 days, consider the needs of participants over that period. Make arrangements for food and beverages.

Budget

Hackathons are not overly complicated or costly to organize. You mainly need a venue, catering and maybe additional things that make the event more fun. To give you an indication: Previous events had an operating budget of about 100-150 euros per participant per day (mainly depending on the price of the food you order). You can ask participants to cover (part) of this, do it on company budget, or get sponsors to cover this.

Date and Duration

Choose dates that would be convenient for most participants. Consider avoiding major holidays or events that may clash with your hackathon. The duration could be 1 to 3 days, depending on the depth of the projects and available resources. Previously it worked well to have part of the Hackathon take place over the weekend.

Please also consider that there might be other Hackathons taking place. It helps to spread these kinds of events both in terms of dates and location. Please contact the Spryker Community team (community@spryker.com) to ask if they are aware of any other Hackathons being organized so we can coordinate this.

Assemble your Team

Though Spryker can help with promotion and provide 2-5 developers to participate and assist on-site, the bulk of the organizational and promotional tasks will fall on you. It’s not rocket science, but you’ll need someone to handle various aspects like marketing, logistics, catering, and venue setup. Since we already have templates for a landing page and registration forms, we (Spryker) can take care of the that part, but you’re still expected to invite your own employees and (local) network.

Hackathon Structure

Design the flow of the hackathon, including registration, team formation, kick-off, hacking time, break times, presentations, and awarding. Make sure to include time for socialization and networking. We have a Miro template for this that we’re happy to share with you.

Announcing the Hackathon

Create an attractive and informative invitation detailing the objective, theme, date, venue, and registration process of the hackathon. Spryker can help promote the event to reach a broader community of developers.

Rules and Judging Criteria

Establish clear rules for the hackathon, including code of conduct, project submission guidelines, and the judging process. While the judging criteria is up to you, ensure it aligns with the hackathon’s goals and theme.

Decide on Prizes (optional)

Decide on the prizes for the hackathon winners. While the specifics are up to you, remember that prizes should be enticing enough to motivate participants. Spryker can contribute by providing merchandise for winners (or all participants).

Conduct the Hackathon

Ensure the event runs smoothly. Your onsite team should handle any logistical issues while the hackathon is ongoing. Ensure participants have everything they need, and keep them updated on timelines and any changes.

For collaboration and collection of the projects code, for each team we can create a new repository on github.com/spryker-community. This makes sure that we have a centralized place for community projects and that we also provide continuity across multiple hackathons where people can build upon previous projects.

Hackathon Project continuation

We’d love for the hackathon projects to live on beyond a single event.

• All participants should publish their code under the MIT License, making it available for anyone to use or modify. An open-source license empowers our whole community to freely use and build upon the contributions that we experience and create during hackathons.
• Please encourage participants to continue or improve upon the work of previous hackathons
• In case of new projects: encourage the creation of a new repository on the Spryker Community GitHub for their projects.

In either case: ask them to also document what they’ve done, provide a summary/presentation of the hackathon results and maybe also even provide some suggestions for future improvements for others (or yourself!) to pickup at the next hackathon.

As an example: for previous hackathons we created a thread for each team on the [CommerceQuest Hackathon] subforum(https://forum.commercequest.space/categories/hackathons). Happy to do that for your hackathon as well!

Post-Hackathon Follow-up

After the hackathon, consider hosting a wrap-up meeting to discuss what worked well and areas for improvement. Share the results and achievements from the hackathon with participants, and thank everyone for their participation.

Some additional tips & tricks:

• For the wifi 🛜: make sure port 22 is open for SSH traffic so developers can push/pull from GitHub (ask us how we know…😱).
• Make sure to have a working coffee machine ☕️ or a backup ⚡️.
• Have name badges/stickers, at least for day 1
• The shorter the Hackathon, the more important it is to organize the topics and teams beforehand. You could use Miro to facilitate this and maybe even invite everyone for a online kickoff meeting in the weeks before the event to handle this. If the hackathon itself is only 1 day, you don’t want to “waste” 2 hours on this part.
• If you made it this far and you’re more interested than ever in organizing a Spryker Hackathon, get in touch with your Spryker contact person or fill out this contact form and we’ll help you take the next steps!

By following these steps, you should be able to plan and execute a successful Spryker Developer Hackathon. Happy planning!