We recently relocated our headquarters 436 feet. After settling into the new office, the first thing we made sure to do was eat.

The second thing we did was have the mayor over for brunch. Once we got all that squared away, it was time to hack.

By now, our hackathons have affectionately become known as “snackathons” – a time when participants get a chance to not only push their limits in technical or business skills, but also to eat their weight in snacks.

Our new, larger space allowed us to create the best Hackathon ever, with loads of perks and surprises for participants, including midnight ice cream and a visit from a personal masseuse.

We changed around how we structure teams this time, to encourage collaboration across the company, not just within departments. Projects included:

SalesBot 4000

Team Members: Ben Ramsey, Bob Moore, Josh Karstendick

SaleBot 4000 is a program that users can compete against to try to sell a theoretical toothbrush. Try your hand at beating the bot here.

Dodeca

Team Member: Mark Licurse

Using basic materials, Mark created a huge wooden dodecahedron that required both math and finesse to build.

Hunger Happiness

Team Member: Natalie Cross

Natalie compiled a thorough report on the company food and kitchen data, plugged into and analyzed with RJMetrics (of course).

100m Dash

Team Members: Sharon Pan, Jay Olman, Emma Eyer

This project analyzed the impact of one of our internal features, Autodash, and ended with a proposal to give this feature higher priority on our product roadmap.

MICRO-SITE, BIG DREAMS

Team Member: Jake Stein

Our new Micro-site teaches visitors what SQL joins are, and how to do them.

Delta Force: Operation Enduring Data

Team Members: Buck Ryan, Chris Merrick

This generic change data capture tool uses mySQL’s internal replication subsystem.

A Solid Gold Fiddle

Team Member: Matt Monihan

A button was added to chartbuilder that creates a new JSFiddle with all the highchart.js code and data necessary to modify and embed the visualization into any website. For example, the project was tested to showcase insights found in an academic paper surveying the prevalence of mustaches in the 20th century.

The Results

Team “Meta Data” inched their way to victory by one of the narrowest voting margins we’ve ever encountered. Connor McArthur, Tristan Handy, Brian Sloane and Greg Guthe took home the trophy for their project ‘Connectr,’ an innovative tool with the potential to dramatically reduce the time it takes to bring in new sources of data to RJMetrics.

Meta Data’s grand prize: $500 cash to be spent on whatever reward they choose.

Want to be a part of our innovative team? You could be hacking with us before you know it. Check out our jobs page.