Juicebox developers flex their innovation muscles at Hackathon 3.0

The team of developers at Juicebox put down their tools earlier in May for the third Juicebox Hackathon, a fun collaborative innovation session where new ideas are tried and tested, and new technologies are experimented with.

We flirted with a number of interesting ideas such as a detection app that would let us know when a client arrives for their meeting, and experimenting with Facebook’s AR studio kit. Though our imaginations can get pretty wild, so we had to reign it back into something we could achieve in an afternoon.

Our senior developer Chris developed an Amazon Echo app that read out a list of coffee products from a website, and could attempt to try and take your order. It also knew a few good coffee jokes!

Josh, Jeremy and myself paired up to work on a dashboard screen for an upcoming digital display for the front of the office. It would show the next meetings booked for each meeting room via our Google Calendar, and also a feed of images from our Instagram account. For this we decided to try for the first time the VSCode Live Sharing capability, which meant we could all code in the same code editor together, similar to how Google Docs works. Unfortunately it is still in beta, so we had to recover from a few nasty setbacks where our code got chewed up and spat back out without an undo!

However with a little frontend love from Josh we came up with something a decent prototype, but it still a long way to go to meet our standards.

Our experiential marketing extraordinaire Jay worked on a 3D sculpting app with Leapmotion controllers.

Jacob, our newly promoted senior developer, enjoyed looking at the future of WordPress and the Gutenberg editor to see how it might affect our projects going forward.

We were thoroughly impressed with the outcome of our ideas in such a short time. Constantly innovating and remaining curious about the future is at the core of our values here at Juicebox. Here’s to the fourth Hackathon in the near future.