Hackday V – Hoverboards and Flying Cars

Since innovation is important to us at Caplin we run regular Hackdays, where developers (and UXistas) form miniteams to build something cool of their choice for 24 hours. At the end of the 24hours everyone presents what they’ve achieved and there are prizes for the winners.

This time around the theme was ‘Hoverboards and Flying Cars’, with a focus on the things that we as a company should be doing to our products over the next few years.

There were some excellent entries with many teams using the full 24 hours available to work through the night fuelled by pizza and too little coffee (apparently the coffee machine doesn’t stay on 24/7. Who knew?).

The entries ranged from a skype bot that could create VMs for you (for internal use), to a beautiful context aware keyboard UX for trading. Teams experimented integrating other products into our frameworks from angular to typescript to karma to docker to lessCSS.

One team created a trading gesture UX that wouldn’t be out of place on a huge touchscreen surface. We had persistent chat components, live reload, phonegap, latency visualisation and a complete FIX workbench that could simulate prices and tradeflows.

Prizes were awarded to both the judges’ choice and the winner of a vote of everyone who attended the presentations. There was a tastefully weighty cup and shield trophy and Occulus Rift VR headsets, Nexus mini tablets and Leap Motion hand sensors for the winners.

There’ll be more detailed blogs from each of the three teams that won prizes coming up over the next couple of weeks.