Held annually at the Santa Barbara headquarters, the HG Insights Hackathon is an immersive exploration of creative projects focusing on the creation of next-wave data-driven solutions to empower business innovators with objective insights to make them more successful.
The week of HG United culminates in a company-wide hackathon, where teams Step Up to develop innovative products and continue pushing the envelope of what’s possible with HG’s Technology Intelligence.
The Hackathon is an integral part of HG’s culture. It’s a time when developers from all over the world — Ukraine, Brazil, India, and Britain, to name a few — put their heads together to further progress HG’s solutions. All developer meetings are canceled so the team can focus on creating the next wave of market-leading technology. It’s a week free from distractions and full of “tech talks,'” engineering improvement sessions, and free-form development days. To keep everyone on track meals are delivered directly to participants, and so are free massages!
Forest Carlisle, VP of Engineering, said, “We just had a good time. Getting to spend time in person with the people you work with every day really sets the foundation to push through not only fun times but also challenging times.”
The 2024 HG Hackathon
This year, team members got the opportunity to work together in person in Santa Barbara, tackling projects they otherwise may not be able to do and to share and test new ideas. Our latest hackathon theme, Data Power, calls back to a time before the widespread adoption of leveraging big data!
At HG, engineering teams (who work on building different solutions and innovations!) have color names. What better way to represent the diverse engineering teams, and projects on which they’re working, than a combination of all the colors — tie dye! The swirl of colors represents the different teams coming together under one common goal.
CTO Rob Fox said, “I’m always in awe of how incredible this team is and what we can get done together. Thanks to everyone for making this another great event — the best one yet. Special thanks to those who traveled far to make it, and especially those who hacked all night (Dawn Patrol).”
Building New Solutions
The 2024 HG Hackathon had some stiff competition. The teams competed for the following awards: Most Innovative, Biggest Improvement, and Most Potential Revenue Impact.
Sr. Software Engineer Paulo Gonzalez said, “It’s awesome to work with smart people and see all these projects come to fruition. It gave us a fresh burst of energy, made us feel appreciated, and was overall an amazing experience!”
Judged by Elizabeth Cholawsky, CEO, Tracy York, EVP, Data Solutions, and Ali Sebring, Director of Product Management, the event was an all-around good, and productive, time! After a long night and day of developing, the 2024 HG Hackathon award winners are:
- Biggest Improvement: Data Firewall
This project designed an externally defined system that can hook into Vulcan’s publication pipeline and provide go/no-go signals. This would allow the experts on other teams to work with QA and define and manage the checks, so they can do what they need to do more efficiently and effectively.
- Most Potential Revenue Impact: HubSpotIT
This project integrated our data to Hubspot accounts allowing an early version of the Hubspot project already under development, to allow us to validate with a few beta customers before moving to the final solution. - Most Innovative: GeoGuesser
This project sought to build a new structure to normalize the locations in some of HG’s data, leveraging “AI” solutions.
We’re happy to report that the hackathon was a great success with several solutions already under active construction and development.
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