Hackathon被翻译成骇客马拉松，我觉得有点不够贴切，看到的人如果不是界内人士，往往觉得它特别炫酷特别高科技，从而觉得遥不可及。其实，这事没那么玄妙，就是一个让人们把自己工作外的想法实现的一个机会。它可能会以一些特定的技术为主题，但是这些也都是业界常用的技术，并不是什么黑魔法。
我写了一篇关于我参加过的骇客松的文章，本来是放在我的个人博客上的，帖在这里吧：
In September 2016, around 6 months after I joined Wayfair, I saw an email from a colleague, introducing a hackathon he was helping to organize. It was the first Reality Virtually Hackathon happening in the MIT Media Lab. I was very curious. I had never participated in a hackathon before! I happened to talk to a colleague Wesley who I worked with on the Registry team, and he was interested too. So off we go!
We met a lot of people in the ideation stage, and formed a brilliant team of 6. The idea was from an MIT research assistant Hisham, and we were to make an VR video editing software! I was so excited, you know why? Because I was in the media industry before. I worked in Shanghai TV station before coming to the U.S, and using a non-linear editing station was part of my job. When I was in grad school as a Media Arts student, I worked for a Law school professor for 2 years, editing his online courses and producing his yearly symposium videos. So I know every pain point a video editor faces, and could only dream of having infinite working space in VR and a whole new way of looking at and editing video clips. Our team also had an editor, a UX designer, a product designer and two engineers. A perfect balance. I learned so many things from each of them!
That was three very long, intensive, exhausting, and fun days (and nights). New to VR programming, I didn’t help much on the coding side, but mainly the brainstorming and concept design. Checkout the cool deck I made on our devpost page. Our team didn’t win, but the time we spent innovating and inventing was priceless.
When I came back, I was addicted (to exploring new ideas outside of regular work and collaborating with different people). I then discovered that hackathon had become a thing at Wayfair. As a front end dev, I participated in a few small projects here and there, helping different teams making their projects look nicer.
In 2017, our team built the first version of Room Planner (later renamed to Styler). It was a tool that allows users to add and manipulate png images on a room background to visualize how furnitures look against each other in a real world room setting. It was a fun project, but I wanted to do more. In that year’s Engineering Challenge day, which was the winter version of Wayfair’s hackathon, I worked with my teammate Alex and built a room planner inspiration feed. The idea was that designing a room was intimidating for most of the regular users, which could be a roadblock for users to adopt our tool. By giving customers the choice to publish their room designs, it could be used by others as an inspiration, or shared on social media to gain more engagements. It could also be used internally by product managers and designers to study how users were using the tool.
Much to our surprises, this project won the Best in Show in Customer User Value. We got a nice trophy, but I gained much more than that. I learned new technologies, pushed my boundary, and challenged myself. I came out more confident that I could do more, without being limited by the technical knowledge I had. And, the inspiration feed later went live as an internal tool.
In 2018, our Styler tool was facing a very big challenge from the users: how do they know the furniture would fit in their space? A 2D sticker can be scaled to mimic depth, thus the real dimensions of the furniture can not be represented accurately. That year, Alex, who was now the tech lead of the team, suggested to build a POC in 3D. Wayfair owns thousands of real time 3D models and they were built to size. This would help with the sizing problem our customers were facing and allow a whole new kind of user experience. Then the problem was, none of us had done 3D before. But, that wasn’t going to stop us. A team of 5 most dedicated and driven engineers came together, divided and conquered. We built a 3D Room Visualizer in 3 days! It was built with babylonjs on top of our React JS library, with the integration of our image recognition and visual search functionality!
Looking back what we did was rough, had a lot of hard coding and staged products. But everyone came out with so much learned. We were the finalist (1 in 5) and got another cool 3D printed trophy! Well, what’s cooler about it was later that year, 3D Room Planner officially became our team’s new feature. We were building it for real.
In March 2019, the MVP of 3D Room Planner was launched. I was so in love with my team. With little to no 3D background, everyone on our team studied and learned. Those months were intensive, but filled with passion, and we helped each other to achieve it.
That is almost the end of my hackathon story. In the summer of 2019, besides giving a company wide workshop on basic 3d knowledges so that other people could start working with babylonjs, we decided to relax and have fun, which means, we were making a game. We built a 3D Escape the Room game with room planner 3d as the platform! Room planner 3d was architected in a very extensible way, and the game was a proof of it. And it was a hit. Who doesn’t want to play Niraj the owner of the company, who got trapped in a room, and had to collect items and solve puzzles to exit? It even had the employee favorite fig bar hidden somewhere.
So, what am I going to do this year?
