Behind the scenes of Wolt Hackathon 2022

In June 2022 we had our second ever Wolt Hackathon in the picturesque Nuuksio national park. In short, Wolt Hackathon is an internal event where teams get together to collaborate intensively on software and product projects with the goal to create a new product or feature from scratch in just 24 hours. The goal is to get together to have fun, innovate and build great things together 🚀.

This time around, a bunch of fifty hackers from our product development teams including software engineers, designers, product leads, analysts and data scientists gathered together for 24 hours in 10 different teams and projects. Here’s what happened.

Hackathon in the making

A few months before the hackathon, our product development teams were given a chance to suggest a hackathon project topic. Altogether we received 25 unique and ambitious project ideas varying from visionary Wolt product features to all kinds of fun ideas. After this, we organized a voting to find the top 10 most wanted projects — anyone in our product development organization was welcome to vote. 

After this, people who wanted to join the hackathon got to vote for their favorite projects to join. Most of the participants got to join their most preferred project and we were able to keep the team size consistent at five to six participants. Before the hackathon, the teams were allowed to plan and design their project. But a strict rule was that all the coding would have to take place during the hackathon.

It was time to get hacking! During the hackathon, the teams had only 24 hours to actually implement their ambitious plans. Some teams enjoyed the famous finnish nightless night by coding throughout the night. After hacking around the 24-hour clock, the teams presented their outcomes in a 5-minute demo. So, the goal was to build a masterpiece which is demo quality rather than production quality.

Surprisingly, 24 hours was enough for all of the teams as we saw ten amazing demos without any major “demo effects” 😏. In addition to the tight time limit, the lakeside saunas and the spa area inside the venue certainly didn’t help in keeping the focus in the hackathon projects. On the other hand, a dip in the chilly lake water was definitely refreshing in the middle of an intense coding session.

After the demos, the winner was chosen by having a vote in which every hackathon participant listed the top three projects. The voting was super tight but eventually we were able to crown the winning team — “I’m feeling lucky!”. More insights into what the teams hacked below.

Sneak peek into some of the projects 

Here’s a short overview of the top 3 projects followed by a few highlights from the rest of the projects. Although the projects presented here are closely related to Wolt products, please note that they’re just hackathon projects, not new features that would be available for all to use. They look shiny on the user interface level but, like usually with hackathon projects, under the hood everything is glued together with clever hacks and definitely not-production-ready code.

Project #1 I’m feeling lucky!

Feeling hungry but don’t know what to eat? The “I’m feeling lucky” team hacked a feature powered by AI to help you discover the best meal to fit your mood. 

Here’s how it works:

1. Open the Wolt app

2. Shake your phone

3. Choose your mood

4. Let AI make the decision for you

5. Enjoy!

Project #2 Chicken Cinder

Have you already tried the Order Together feature on Wolt? If you haven’t, it’s a super handy way for ordering for a group of people without the need to pass a single phone around while deciding what each of the people want to eat from the menu of the selected restaurant. Everyone can simply pop in and pay for their part of the order via their own Wolt app.

But when ordering with friends or any group of people, it’s often hard to decide which restaurant to go for. Chicken Cinder provides a solution! Each participant swipes left or right and at the end there’s the best possible match for the whole group! No need to argue with friends, let Chicken Cinder decide for you 😉. Here’s how it works.

Project #3 Shareable tracking links (aka Project Slinky)

When you order a gift from Wolt for a friend or a family member who isn’t located in the same place as you are, wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to share the real-time order tracking experience with them? 

Project Slinky made this possible by introducing a share button in the order tracking view which allows sharing a link to an order tracking web page which can be opened by anyone, even if they are not Wolt users, during the lifetime of the delivery order.

We wish we could share with you all the projects as there were so many great hacks by the team! It’s also worth mentioning that not all the projects were related to Wolt product features. For example, team “Wolt Name Game 2.0” built a game for Wolt people to guess the name of their colleagues. You simply get images of colleagues on the screen and pair them with the right name. If you’re fast and don’t make mistakes, you can find yourself in the leaderboard. Simple and useful when we’ve got new colleagues joining us almost every week 😉.

Altogether the Wolt Hackathon was once again an amazing 24 hours 💙. We want to thank everyone who made it into such a great experience and hope to do another great hackathon full of innovations next year!

Want to be a part of our next Wolt Hackathon? We’re hiring! Find our open jobs at wolt.com/jobs.