I won a hackathon!

My team of 3 won SHIP IT 2019! This was my first hackathonin DPG Media's brand new headquarters in Antwerp. I had a great 24 hours mob-programming, meeting the CEO and running through the hallways at night with Nerf guns 😀

So what did our tiny task force do? In less than 24 hours (ok.. more like 24 minutes) we build a production-ready reading progress indicator on all our premium brands. The reading progress indicator is an unobtrusive interactive visual element which conveys how far the subscriber has read the article. The indicator behaves differently depending on the brand and type of article it is displayed on. For instance, for soccer related news, the indicator is a soccer ball that approaches a goal.

Second, we created an "underbelly" version of our platform. This version renders the frontpage of the brand as normal, but with one twist: all the headlines are replaced with randomly selected comments of the underlying article. The result? A hilarious "reader-driven" version of your favorite newspaper. This mechanism worked surprisingly well on our popular brands, that attract a lot of uh-- passionate comments from its readers.

Third, we created an automagic general-purpose watermarker for our content and implemented it as part of our social-sharing-functionality. This means that whenever someone somewhere shares one of our articles on social media, the thumbnail of that article on social media will have our brand's logo embedded into it. This increases the exposure of our brands on social media.

Finally, through some CSS invert() magic, we implemented a rudimentary dark-mode into our online news delivery platform, for all our readers to enjoy.

All of the above lead the jury consisting of our CEO, CIO and two others to choose us as the winner of the 2019 SHIP IT. Our prize? A personal tour of the executive top-floor of our HQ by our CEO followed by a lunch with said CEO himself!