Thinking beyond the roadmap - the 2019 Shortcut Hackathon

At the end of each year, Housemates from every department form teams and participate in a beloved Shortcut tradition, our annual Hackathon! For two days, the team steps away from our day-to-day responsibilities and is challenged to think beyond the roadmap. The Hackathon embodies our culture of joy, collaboration, and innovation, and has become the perfect playground for experimentation and discovery.

The Shortcut Hackathon rules were simple; focus on Shortcut related ideas or problems you are passionate about solving.

Hacking commenced on 12/9 and concluded on 12/11 with 3-minute presentations given during our Town Hall. Prizes were awarded for the following categories:

• Joy
• Kurt’s Choice
• Integrations
• Housemates' Choice

In less than 48 hours we shipped some exciting updates and built the foundation for new features. Read on to learn more about the hacks the team tackled. If you see an unshipped feature you'd like to see in Shortcut, please share in the comments section!

CLI Stay in your terminal (Winner: Joy)

Hacker: Toby Crawley and Eli Naher

Toby and Eli worked on building a CLI that interacts with the Shortcut API to make it easier for developers to work in Shortcut from their command line. This feature would make it possible to create Stories, move them from the different Workflow States, add Stories to Iterations, and more - all from their terminal.

Status: Not released

Terminal integration in Shortcut (Winner: Kurt's choice)

Hacker: Ben Wittenberg

Ben focused on building a terminal integration that allows you to configure and send events to your host system from Shortcut. The terminal integration includes a spotlight-style pop-up that allows you to send a variety of events to your system from Shortcut.

Status: Not released but check out the Action Bar to see an iteration of this feature born from Ben's work.

Shortcut Slack Magic AKA Shortcut Slack Notifications (Winner: People's choice)

Hacker: Osei Poku

Osei came up with an enhancement to our Slack integration to ensure users get notified in Slack when important things happen in Shortcut. Slack Magic sends a Slack direct message when a user gets @-mentioned in Shortcut, in addition to the standard email and mobile app notification.

Status: Not released

Write App Importer (Winner: Integrations)

Hacker: Christine Cha

Christine produced a Write App Importer prototype to make it easy to import and organize all essential documents in Write. With a few clicks, users can import documents from different apps such as Dropbox, Google Docs, Notion, and more, into Shortcut Write!

Status: Not released

Recently Viewed Stories and Epics

Hacker: Andrew Childs

Users have asked for a way to see Recently Viewed Stories and Epics and Andrew delivered! This new feature makes it possible to see the last 50 Stories and Epics viewed in a handy drop-down.

Status: 🚢

Shortcut Automations

Hackers: Jeremy Heiler and Juan Solano

Jeremy and Juan worked on a solution to automate repetitive tasks and processes in Shortcut using triggers and templates. With Shortcut Automations, users would be able to "create a Story with XYZ template every Monday at 9:00 AM" or "add an Owner Y to Stories in Workflow X when it enters the QA state."

Status: Not released

API Server Deploys take forever (nobody has time for that!)

Hacker: Paul Groudas

Paul identified an opportunity to deploy faster on our backend so we can iterate and fix customer-facing issues more quickly. With his update, our backend server deploy-time has been reduced by ~70%, so our team can continue to increase our shipping velocity and deliver more value to users. Thanks, Paul!

Status: 🚀🚀🚀

macOS desktop Shortcut app

Hacker: Nicolas Charpentier

Nicolas worked on creating a wrap of our web app to make it possible to use Shortcut in macOS desktop for his Hackathon project.

Status: Not released

Commonly used emojis

Hackers: Andrew Childs and Juan Solano

Andrew and Juan came up with a way for users to use save time when using Emoji Reactions. Now when a user goes to add an emoji to Comments, the pane includes a Commonly Used section so they don't have to hunt for the 👍 or 😊.

Status: 🚀🚀🚀

Shortcut Annotations

Hacker: Daniel Gregorie

Daniel came up with a concept that provides a fast command to generate a human-friendly view of annotations for a specific annotation set.

Status: Not released

Focus Mode

Hackers: Connie Chau and Joey Shampain

Connie and Joey came up with a concept they dubbed Focus Mode to help users block out the noise and focus on the work that is most important to them. Focus Mode would provide users with a keyboard shortcut on the Stories page to switch to a simplified UI and block notifications.

Status: Not shipped

Story Celebrations

Hacker: Al Power

The team is constantly trying to find more ways to bring joy into your day-to-day. Al put this into action by creating a celebratory animation featuring our mascot Dot, which appears after you've created 10 Stories.

Status: Not released

The 2019 Shortcut Hackathon allowed us to think beyond the roadmap, collaborate, and celebrate everyone’s creative work. We walked away energized, inspired, and more committed to improving the user experience and building the best project management platform for software development.

Let us know what your favorite hacks and projects are in the comments - you may see your favorite Hackathon project in Shortcut!