Smart Hackathon 2022: Quality

The Hackathon

Here at Smart, there is a yearly Hackathon. All of our global teams are invited to come together and work on exciting things which fall outside the remit of what they usually do on a day-to-day basis. They have 24 hours to work as a team to create a solution which answers the theme of the Hackathon. It's also an invaluable experience for us all to meet and work with people from different areas of the business, as well as developing other skills like communication and working under pressure.

My experience

The theme of this year’s Hackathon was quality, an intentionally broad and subjective topic, inspiring outside-the-box ideas. Ideas are pitched, and the teams are formed to work on the concept that excites them the most. After only being able to attend previous Hackathons from home, it was great to finally hack away together in person, and work virtually with our global team members. 

It began with a kick-off session, and once we had all gathered together, everyone was eager to get started on their respective projects. My team focused on how we could improve our environmental impact through pensions. We wanted to provide members with the opportunity to invest their pension savings into companies that have a high ESG score and receive incentives to do so. Our team consisted of an agile lead, a UX designer and several engineers, covering both back-end and front-end specialties. We had beautiful designs created for us by our designer, then used these to work out what we wanted to achieve. 

Throughout the day, Smart generously put on amazing food to keep everyone’s spirits high and their bellies full. It was also a great chance to chat with other team members, find out how they were doing, have some friendly light-hearted banter and, in true Smart style, help the other teams out when they needed it. It also wouldn’t be complete without some Hackathon swag – the t-shirts, which were amazingly designed with the party parrot featuring on the back.

Presentations and awards

After a brisk 24 hours, each team gave their ten-minute presentations and showed off their hard work. Every submission was truly amazing. It’s genuinely impressive to see what can be achieved in 24 hours!

We had five award categories:

• most novel idea
• best pitch
• best implementation
• people’s choice
• overall winner

There were many winners of this year’s Hackathon, with loads of inspiring projects, like Tamagitchi’s Google Chrome extension to make good quality code reviews, and Heimdall’s Mac/PC application that enables developers to track pull requests in real time on a status bar.

The overall winners of the Smart Hackathon 2022 were the Blue Whales, who used machine learning and data science to proactively detect anomalies within our database and ensure the quality of our data. It was an incredibly impressive project and a well-deserved victory!

Watch now to find out more about this year’s Hackathon.