It’s a Hack-a-thon! Pandemics, Shippy McShipface, and more.

At last, we held our first official Hack-a-thon! Carving out time between sprints, as any dev team knows, can be a challenge, but Justin Weiss, Director of Software Development, saw an opportunity and made it happen. Ten total teams participated in Avvo’s inaugural hack-a-thon, working in various areas of the 15th floor for three days.

On Friday, April 1st, each team shared their work over drinks in our main kitchen. Here’s a few of the highlights:

  1. Team Ship It, winner of “Best Overall” category. How do you take the manual processes out of shipping? With Ship-It Autodeploys, affectionately dubbed Shippy McShipface after a certain research boat whom the British public wanted to name Boaty McBoatface. Leslie Zavisca, Seth Ringling, and Matthew Purdy integrated all the manual processes into one easy-to-use tool. With Shippy McShipface, er, Ship-It, there’s no more waiting around for each individual task to complete. If there’s a problem in shipping, the tool notifies you and tells you where the issue is. Just Ship-It!
  2. Team Pandemic. How quickly does a pandemic spread? Skyler Parr, Michael Garvais, and Margo Arnold built a rudimentary game using Elixir to show us how. Although it was a little buggy (pun intended), the team demonstrated how a few infected people traveling from city to city and country to country can snowball into a pandemic.
  3. Secret Team, winner of “Highest Potential to Become a Real Product” category. The Secret Team did a great job of keeping what they were doing a secret, but once they shared, it became clear that their project has a lot of potential to become a site feature for Avvo lawyers. Led by Nischal Pathania, Ian Johnson, and Matt Kleinman, the Secret Team created an Ad Marketing Performance dashboard for attorneys, which would give each attorney insight into their ROI and how to tweak their approach for better results.
  4. Billy proved that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is only as smart as what you put into it, creating some hilarity for the group. Ian Corbin created a text functionality where consumers could text questions to Avvo lawyers. Add in cheeky greetings and responses to the AI, and you’ve got a raucous good time.
  5. Team Ava, winner of “Most Creative” category. You might know Jenn of Alaska Airlines, the helpful AI assistant in the top right corner of your screen when you are booking flights. Meet Ava, your Avvo legal assistant. Created by Rathi Thekkemadathil, Roy Tan, and Slobodan Bojanic, Ava is a persona built from the millions of Q&As in the Avvo database.

Look for our next Hack-a-thon update this summer!