Cabify Explorers

Motivation

Often times, our tight schedules don’t leave much time to invest in risky projects that may not reach production ever, but we also know that those projects often discover game-changing innovations.

So, we’ve created “Explorers” as a recurring hackathon. Whether you’re devising revolutionary features, optimising workflows, or tackling intricate challenges, “Explorers” is your chance to dream big, disrupt the norm, and even get your prototype into the roadmap.

Description

The Explorers initiative is an internal hackathon organised at Cabify, tipically twice a year.

Goals

  • Have fun: It is fun to be able to experiment, to build something new without the constraints of the day-to-day job.
  • Share knowledge: You might be touching some parts of the system that you are not familiar with.
  • Bonding: You will work in teams, probably with people that you don’t usually work with.
  • Let off some steam: Despite the tight agenda, this is very useful to disconnect and cool down a little bit.
  • Innovate: maybe that crazy idea you have isn’t so crazy after all.

Dates & Format

Check the current explorer edition to know details about the dates.

Categories

There will be six categories for prices, and you can only apply to one category and “best of bests”:

  • Quality: We want to provide the best assets, high quality service and support through our customer service center, both for drivers and riders
  • Safety: We seek to take security one step further by guaranteeing market standards and ensuring that we are recognized as the safest mobility platform for our stakeholders
  • Personalization: We will deliver an experience to all stakeholders that is perceived as tailored to the needs and requirements of these stakeholders
  • Internal Customers: We’ll make our colleagues job easier by providing better and more efficient tools
  • Geek: We are tech people and we love to build geek things to make our tech day to day even more awesome
  • Best of bests: Simply the best project of them all

Deliverables

The deliverable can be a combination of these two:

  • A YouTube video, max duration of 5 minutes
  • Google Slides

Your deliverables will be added to the Google Slides presentation 1 hour before the presentation event (12:00 CE(S)T on Thursday). No changes to your presentation will be alowed after that.

Presentations

‼️ Important: no, you can’t perform a live demo, no matter how confident you are.

‼️ Important: we’ll be really strict on times. Assuming we’ll have 20 projects, 5 minutes per project plus one minute to switch between means that we’ll run into 120 minutes of presentation, and hot pizza is better than cold pizza.

If your deliverable is a video:

  • The video will be played.
  • You can add audio to your video or you can talk while your video is playing.
  • You will have 5 minutes max between the slides and the video.

If your deliverable are Google Slides:

  • The Slides will be presented and you will gain control of the presentation so you can pass the slides.
  • You will have max 5 minutes to do your presentation. After that, you will lose control of the presentation :troll:

When the projects should be registered

Anyone can register their project until the presentation’s Thursday 12:00 (one hour before voting, we still need to prepare stuff to avoid the disaster). In order to register your project, you have to add it to the presentations sheet of the Explorers spreadsheet.

Who can participate

Everyone can sign up, unless production env is in flames and you’re the one who can fix it, your Gitlab issues and Shortcut cards can wait until next Monday, this is work too, but in a different style.

Teams

We encourage you to work in teams, that’s one of the goals. Are you an infrastructure or backend engineer? Don’t be shy and ask the Design or Frontend team for help, they’ll be happy to be involved and meet you, and vice-versa.

Winner cups

We’ll have two winner cups, one for each track, and they will be transferred in each edition to the new winners. We work in a competitive market, among huge players and the same happens to the Explorers winner cups: in order to keep having it, you need to keep being the best.

TL;DR

This is how the timeline will look like:

  • Days before the Explorers
    • Write the ideas of your projects in the project proposals spreadsheet
    • Share your ideas on the #t-ch-explorers channel
    • Think, explore and investigate possible solutions
    • If you didn’t propose an idea find one that suits you exploring the channel and the list of projects.
  • First day
    • 09:00: Start hacking. Fail. Keep hacking.
  • Hacking days
    • Continue hacking all day long.
  • Presentation day
    • tree minutes before the deadline: Realize that you haven’t registered yet, record a video
    • two minutes before the deadline: Youtube is still processing your video
    • one minute before the deadline: Paste your video link into the registration spreadsheet
    • Deadline to register, organization checks the links and pokes for permissions, meanwhile you prepare whatever is needed (are you remote? check your headset battery)
    • Presentations start
      • We start the 5 minute timer and give you the word (in this order)
      • If there’s a video/presentation, we share it
      • We click on the presentation link and give the word to whoever is presenting (we don’t wait for your audio setup to work)
    • two hours later: 10 minutes for voting through Google Forms
    • Winners announcement :tada:

Please, check the current edition’s page to know about the exact schedule and dates

FAQ

Q: What if I start a project but I don’t finish it?

Then you don’t register and don’t present it. That’s why you should register on Thursday when you have something to present.

Q: Can I participate in more than one team?

As a recommendation we encourage not to be involved in more than one team.

  • This could prevent other members to join a project due to the “max 10 people per project” rule.
  • It could make you be “half-in” in both projects.
  • It can create uncertainty on when are you going to be available for each project, or even make you a bottle neck.