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The 2022 Shortcut Hackathon Round Up
It’s that time of year again - last week we conducted our annual hackathon! During this marathon of hacking, all Shortcut employees were invited to set aside their routine work and cross-collaborate intensely on new, exciting, and fun projects. At the end of the week, we demoed the projects and had a grand old time.
Hackathons are a natural way to drive innovation. Fun fact: Shortcut was built out of a hack day project. Read more about it & its origin story here.
Our annual hackathon is great because it allows our teams to come together to:
- Be creative
- Find different solutions to problems
- Test our skills
- Collaborate with different people
- Discover different talents
During this year’s hackathon, most projects focused on improvements to the Shortcut app; some projects focused on our own ability to reach company goals; and some projects focused on making the concept of work itself more enjoyable. All of which were enjoyable.
All in all, nineteen projects were presented, with ten winning awards across four categories. Here is a selection!
Pin Entities
Change all instances of pin icon to the star icon. The "Pin/Unpin" action will now be "Favorite/Unfavorite". Change Following icon to from star to Activity in all instances (after all, the activity icon shows work that is being followed). Update instances in code and DB.
SHQL
Shortcut's own language that enables users to build ad-hoc reports including visualizations like pie charts, histograms, and more!
Slack Conversations
Enhance the existing Shortcut <> Slack integration with support for emoji reactions, support for editing comments and posts, add support for deleting comments from Slack, and more.
No more Standups
Automate the surfacing of blockers so that it can be revealed in Shortcut as soon as it's known, eliminating an entire class of meetings.
Overlapping PRs
Detect potential merge conflicts before any PRs are merged and show that on related Stories.
Public Docs
Share a Shortcut Doc to others outside your organization without requiring a login or password.
Doc Collections
Improve Doc organization by allowing users to pin Docs and Doc Collections, create and manage nested Collections, and view and manage all docs in a new collection index page.
Doc Reviews
Provide users the ability to request reviews on draft Docs, through which their teammates can provide feedback and ultimately approve a Doc’s contents. Similar to our VCS integration which automatically updates a story’s status based on git branches and pull requests, the actions of requesting reviews, submitting responses, and approving a Doc would also update a related story’s status.
Spooky Season Dark Mode
Integrate dark and light mode color updates to incorporate new visual style.
OpenTelemetry in Anger
Integrates our homegrown application interfaces for structured logging and metrics into OpenTelemetry (with a collector and span visualizer in dev) to diagnose a performance mystery.
Exploring Reporting Improvements
Create a better infrastructure for testing what charts users use and interact with on the Reports page so we can improve the user experience.
Build-side Report Feature
Add the Report a Bug feature across the entire application to allow users to send feedback about their experience.
Dot Game
Unleash joy upon our users with an easter egg video game.
And the winners are…
Best for Devs
SHQL
OpenTelemetry in Anger
Dev Tools
Most Aligned for Growth
Pin Entities
Public Docs
Slack Conversations
Most Likely to Help Teams
Slack Conversations
Overlapping PRs
No more Standups
Most Ready for Production
Context Menu
Ck-Editor Watchdog -> Doc recovery
Pin Entities
And that’s a wrap for our 2022 Shortcut Hackathon!
Let us know what your favorite projects are in our Shortcut Discord or take this survey and you may end up seeing some of these features in the app soon! We’ll keep you posted.
We’ll see you next year for the 2023 Shortcut Hackathon. Until then, if you’re not already using Shortcut, what are you waiting for? Start your free trial.
