Organization

This year, JetBrains moved to a new office, and the hackathon had to be postponed a bit, but it still happened. The rules were simple:

1. The beginning is on Wednesday, September 18, at noon.
2. The last commit is no later than noon on Friday. All presentations should be ready by this time.
3. Presentations start at 1 p.m. on Friday, September 20. Each team has 5 minutes.
4. Awarding, prizes!

Action

There were more ideas and projects than in any of the previous hackathons. 182 participants submitted 70 projects.



Registration opened at 10 a.m., participants received a hacker kit: toothpaste and brush, t-shirts, badges, stickers.



56 projects reached the finish line, we will talk about the most notable ones.

Winners

We tried a new way to determine the winners.



The jury, in which there were people of different positions and different teams, determined:

- In what categories to win prizes

- Who won in these nominations



All prizes were the same, and the number of winning projects in each nomination was unlimited.



But there was, of course, one main winner , whose name fell on the Hackathon Cup. It was determined by the voices of everyone who works at JetBrains.



Nominations:

Business Benefits

Special builds

Mikhail Vink, Ivan Chirkov, Sergey Kesarev



The idea is simple: JetBrains Product + Plugins = Custom Build.



The guys worked on the ability to collect different IDEs by connecting different plugins. This will help not only users to receive a stable product for specific purposes, but also offer our marketing exactly what our customers need.



Objectives:

• The ability to download and buy a special assembly in one click.
• Try using the IntelliJ IDEA protocol and Toolbox integration.
• Add custom assembly support to plugins.jetbrains.com .
• Develop pricing policies for such products.
• Provide marketing materials to promote special builds.

The guys made ten assemblies that can be delivered from the Toolbox or product.

Best presentation

Local History Viewer

Maarten Balliau, Matt Ellis

What you can touch

Pushbar

Ivan Kuleshov



In 2016, Apple decided that function keys are not as important as emoticons, and replaced them with a narrow screen called Touch Bar. What do motivated people do if they still need these keys?



30 hours of development, 3 keyboards, 2 macbooks of 2015, 18 cups of coffee, 5 concepts - and two versions of PushBar are ready: “Pro” with a USB-C connector for those who want real physical keys, and “Mini”, which you can leave inside a closed laptop.

Cool idea

Extrasense

Dmitry Neverov, Victor Matchenko



In programming, it is not very common to use hearing. Imagine that you get additional information about what is happening just by listening. For example, you can set breakpoints so that they tell you if something went wrong.



Let’s say, if you observe the time of collecting the cache, put such sound breakpoints in the right places - and you will immediately hear a sound if the cache is not collected at all. That's when exactly “silence is gold”!



It will be easy to understand how often this or that event occurs, for example, how regularly your application goes to the database. The guys also realized the dependence of the pitch on certain parameters, for example, the higher the sound, the more memory is occupied.

Most useful for the developer

Point Profiler for IntelliJ IDEA

Dmitry Batrak



How do you know how long it takes to execute a certain piece of code? To do this, the profiler will have to be configured to measure only this section, possibly highlighting it as a separate function / method. You can add additional code that measures runtime, but this is inconvenient, because it complicates the interaction with the version control system: it is more difficult to check the effect of a commit on performance, and you can commit the debugging code by mistake.



The created plugin allows you to do the same without changing the source code on the disk - changes are made in memory, before passing the code to the compiler. The measurement results are displayed directly in the editor, next to the profiled fragment.

Most fun

CodeQuiz

Svetlana Isakova, Sebastian Aigner, Ilya Chernikov, Pavel Nikolaev, Alexander Anisimov



Games like Kahoot are insanely popular in education around the world. At conferences, reports and workshops, we wanted to use something similar, but focused on programmers and questions about code. This is how CodeQuiz came about.

Office life

Hello Space !

Irina Manolova, Andrey Vasiliev, Evelina Yun, Daria Pavlyuk, Maria Mikheyshina, Alexandra Charikova



Space is our new office in St. Petersburg. He is big, and newcomers need help to figure out what's what. The project “Hello, Space!” Helps not only new employees to quickly adapt to life in the office, but also the guys from the HR department who previously had to tell everything anew, and now they just need to type the employee’s name in the text box. Everything else "Hello, Space!" Will tell himself!



The new employee will receive a series of emails from which he will learn how dinners are organized, how to get a book from the library, what sports teams there are in JetBrains, where to rent plastic, where is the gym, and so on.







And in order not to have to look for letters in the mailbox every time there is a question about the office, the guys made a chat bot in Slack. It can help not only beginners, but also those who have been working for a long time.

Projects to help beginners

This year, many presented projects that help new employees. Perhaps some of these ideas you can apply in your company, so we will briefly talk about all of them. You are already familiar with “Hello, Space!”, Here are the rest:



HTF (How To Find) 2.0

Natalya Mashyanova, Maxim Mazin, Nastya Berezinskaya, Arkady Bazhanov, Oleg Bakhirev, Ekaterina Zaikina



This is the second version of the app that won the CEO prize last year.



HTF is a game in which you need to guess the name of a JetBrains employee in a photograph. Getting 10 out of 10 is getting harder - there are already over a thousand people at JetBrains. The game can be played not only at the computer, but also in the dining room at dinner - sometimes photographs with answer options are broadcast on office television.







In the new version, the interface has changed, integration with the internal social network has been made, the ability to guess employees only from a specific office or team has been added. Achievements appeared, for example, "I guessed everyone in the team."



Random coffee

Yuri Artamonov, Anastasia Goncharova, Julia Renewed, Sergey Boytsov, Alexander Izmailov



This project solves approximately the same task - to help people get to know each other. But here it is a personal acquaintance: the program will choose a random employee, with whom you will arrange a ten-minute break at a coffee point.



The onboarding game

Oscar Rodriguez, Catherine Ryabuha, Joaquim Trevino



About a couple of months before the Hackathon, the guys conducted a small experiment and organized the first quest for employees in the history of JetBrains. Passing the quest, newcomers got acquainted with the main corporate resources. The authors at the same time checked how well our old-timers are familiar with these resources.



After this experiment, the guys got a lot of positive feedback and decided to develop the idea with the quest further in the framework of the Hackathon. In the new version, the participants decoded the letter with the text on the contrary, read the instructions in the Klingon language and looked for several carefully hidden links to Confluence.



Lego BrainStorms

David Watson, Henry Wilde, Nikolai Sandalov, Scott Adams, Ekaterina Ivanova, Tobias Kahlert, Nadezhda Davydova, Pavel Ivanov, Arina Chubarkova



A comic book that describes all the adventures of the new JetBrains on his first working day.

Cup holder

Only one project could win the main prize. He became " Hello, Space! "







JetBrains staff voted for the application that they themselves would like to see on their first working day :) Congratulations!

Hackathon in numbers

1 trophy

2 days

6 hours of presentations

7 nominations

9 winners

12 guests

56 projects reached the finish line

70 projects have applied

182 participants

305 votes

$ 18,000 in prizes







It was fun and useful as always!