Internal hackathon 2026: twenty-four hours, seven teams, one rule

Everyone in the studio stopped client work for a day and a night. The one rule was that whatever you built had to be demonstrable at 6pm the next day — no slides.

Seven teams formed on the Friday morning, deliberately mixed so that no team was all engineers or all designers. Teams picked their own problem; the only constraint was the demo at the end, running, on a real device or a real screen.

Three of the seven projects went into the product backlog the following week. The one that drew the most argument was a prototype that read a Notedy transcript and opened a StickyBoard with a card per decision — an idea that has since turned into the actions export shipped this month.

We ran the whole thing in the office, ordered too much food, and finished with demos in the main room. The photographs are on our Facebook page.

How the day ran

• Friday 09:00 — teams form and pitch in one sentence each.
• Friday 10:00 to Saturday 17:00 — build. The office stayed open overnight.
• Saturday 18:00 — seven demos, five minutes each, live only.
• Voting by everyone present, including the people who did not compete.