Hack Days 2022
INNOVATION is the art of establishing something different or new out in the real world that has a significant impact —
(Definition by the Autodesk Innovation Genome project)
Following our yearly tradition we held a two day hackathon, known as EGYM Hack Days. This year’s halloween themed event took place in October 2022 in our headquarters in Munich with remote engineers joining online. The energy and creativity could be felt leaking through the online channels and floors of our offices. Participants formed groups tackling 9 different innovation topics, ranging from embedded devices, operating systems, to mobile-apps and backends. Some totally new ideas were generated as well as some continuations on bigger innovation projects, that already started before the event.
What Are Hack Days?
For those who are not familiar with the hackathon format, a hackathon is a creative and chaotic gathering of engineers, designers, thinkers,… working toward a common goal. With EGYM, this is no exception. The entire Software Engineering Team was involved, making an exciting event. With many engineers, it was important to “stack the deck”, enabling teams to be successful and have fun.
The 7 key questions we were asking ourselves:
- What could we look at in a new way?
- What could we use in a new way, or for the first time?
- What could we move, changing its position in space or time?
- What could we interconnect, for the first time or in a new way?
- What could we alter, in terms of design and performance?
- What can we make that is truly new?
- What can we imagine that would create a great experience for someone?
The EGYM Hack Days allow us to bring rapid change, investigations, and disruption, outside of day to day routines. Participants get an opportunity to learn about new methodologies, techniques, and technologies, and get to apply those lessons directly to existing code base or on a green field. Already weeks before the event, proposals provided by the entire software engineering and product organizations were gathered. Participants had the chance to already form softly committed teams on topics they wanted to work on.
As proven already we provided a handful of guidelines for topics:
- Projects should ideally be small enough to reach an increment or to complete in two days
- Large projects can be documented in a special Kanban board — our central source for Innovation Topics, that can be also used following up on the hack days
- Topics should be somewhat related to EGYM and/or Software Engineering
- Project outcomes can be evaluated afterwards to reach production — in which case we would catch up on our usual development steps (e.g. architecture review, code style, CI/CD, peer reviews, etc)
By mixing up the team structure during the Hack Days, we are sharing knowledge across team structures and all participants can gain a better understanding of the platform and organisation and form many new bonds and connections.
Days of the hacking
Our opening ceremony on the first day, included an introduction by Flo our CTO, elevator pitches of the ideas and a team building exercise.
And without further ado we want to proudly present the projects that came out of Hack Days 2022!
Machine GUI on Flatpak
Optimizing download bandwidth use for software updates by employing Flatpak-powered differential updates.
*awarded the Best Backend Award
Project Stanley
Mobile App for tracking body weight exercises using pose detection. *awarded the Most Ambitious Award
P2P File Sharing on smart strength
A nice little prototype for sharing files between machines over a peer to peer network was developed as a project for the hack days in 2021. The project is based on libp2p and is written in Rust. The goal for it’s second iteration was to polish and deploy it to a group of strength machines and let them talk to each other.
Arkanoid for the rotator
To make trainings on the Rotator fun we created a new training method that is reminiscent of the game Arkanoid.
*awarded the Best Frontend Award
Better member search
Provide better member search for trainers in Trainer App. This search is insensitive to diacritics and small alternative spellings in some European languages.
Machine GUI in flutter
From time to time the question comes up if new device software could be written with flutter. It’s a good idea to experiment a bit and try to write a small application for the strength machine in flutter.
Marketplace UI for test environments
A marketplace of our services, where users can can click their environment together. The marketing frontend creates a PR in terraform to be reviewed and deployed.
Qualtrain bike
This project explores if it is possible to expand our gym network with bikes, leveraging out existing technology.
Elastic Search in Activity Library
*awarded the Most Customer Centric Award
Retrospective
Looking back at our resolutions following last year’s Hack Days, we managed the planning of the event gracefully and were able to ensure blocking the time and places in good time. The fun factor was definitely very high.
Here are some quotes from participants of the Hack Days:
Coool projects and really nice presentation in the end :) I like the multitude of different topics and technologies :)
A big KUDOs to the organisers for the reminders, the kick-off, the food, the prices and bringing the team together
As not all engineers were able to travel this year, engineers longed for…
Everyone to be at one location
Overall, everyone enjoyed the Hack Days immensely. There was tons of fun, and great ideas sparked from it. Inspiration continues…
