FireHydrant hack week spring 2022 has shipped

The engineering team just completed our first hack week of 2022. We termed the event Ignite, knowing it would be a hotbed of experimentation and ideas that get the team excited. We wanted everyone to have fun, experiment, and work on things they were passionate about. For that reason, we didn’t implement too many boundaries and encouraged folks to explore tooling ideas, awesome new product features, process improvements, or anything else that will make FireHydrant more awesome. 

And just to make it more exciting, we offered prizes in three categories:

• Best product hack: any hack related to the product and the technology behind the product

• Best internal hack: any hack related to internal tools and processes

• People’s hack award: favorite as chosen by all the participants

Below are some of the cool projects the teams submitted:

Mock data tool: A mock data user interface in our rails app that would generate test data in order to simulate certain accounts/users/runbooks etc. 

Incident facts: Using Slack bookmarks and a new command,`/fh facts keeps important incident information close at hand. Messages within chat clients can be tagged as facts or something to investigate while trying to mitigate an incident. 

Runbook step execution as a service: Automating runbooks is one of our most beloved features at FireHydrant as it enables connecting disparate systems and handling monotonous tasks. 

Data visualization: Data visualization exploration to find a tool/ui to show dependency trees and impact paths.

GraphQL: This project experimented with using a different technique for delivering our JSON API. 

No hack week would be complete without demos, and what was most fun about ours was the surprises. Though folks had shared a sentence or two about what they were building, the demos were full of big reveals and ‘oh wow’ moments. 

Seeing these projects move from idea to prototype opens up new possibilities for how they get scoped as a formal part of our roadmap. We’re now looking at ways to bring some of these projects to life in the product. 

We want to build a product and a company where great ideas aren’t buried under an exhausting list of issues. Hack week is an important part of breeding a culture of experimentation and creativity and creating space for each engineer at FireHydrant to have their voice heard in the product. If that sounds like the type of place you’d enjoy building, we’re hiring.