One of our longest-running traditions at  Mito is the Hackathon. The idea was cooked up by a mad scientist of ours in 2012 after taking part in one. We’ve never been the same since then. 

What is a Mito Hackathon about? 24 hours of challenge, pain, glory, exhaustion, mission, survival, hopelessness, joy, synergies, moonshots – it really depends on whom you ask. 

But our official version is: work in teams and deliver a complete product in 24 hours.

A Hackathon always has a scope and a purpose which varies from year to year. In our case, it has previously revolved around efficiency, fun, games, smart hardware, charity, anything you can put in a physical frame, and once it was even love, that is all around. With the brief always slightly shifting every year, different competencies and roles have an advantage or rather a significant increase in demand. But that never changes:

• We enter in teams (typically of 5 people) of mixed competencies and collaborate
• Of course, we also aim for the top three spots as this is a competition after all, but of the friendly kind
• We have a jury that differs each year and it can feature external guests as well
• The location is always our office but with different seating
• Snacks, energy drinks, and junk food to keep everyone going for a day
• No limitations whatsoever as to who can join or what can be created
• Demo presentations right after the 24 hours are up
• One extra vacation day for anyone who competes and of course prizes for the first three

And what does all this look like? Well something like this:

Of course, these various briefs and topics have spawned many-many clever, silly, outrageous, brave, and really inspiring solutions. Just to name a few:

• Our own time management software that we use to this day
• A calendar of movie poster spoofs featuring Mitolians
• Our very own children’s book with fairy tale versions of our own stories
• A smartwatch-based game that lets you smash zombies
• OTT TALI – A party sticker pack that even got featured on national TV
• An onboarding software we currently give to our newcomers
• An infinite mirror which is, well, infinite
• A sonified ambient real-time telepresence portal (?) – a cute little interactive blob that helps connect people far apart
• An app monitoring the occupancy of toilets
• The Vacation Monster (Szabiszörny) which is hungry for vacation data, and tracks our holidays even today
• Handmade Mito sleeves for laptops with its own webshop
• A huge button for our office managers to alarm everyone when the fresh fruit has arrived
• Countless games ranging from RPGs to zengames and multiplayer sports tournaments
• Our very own digital history book and an online museum
• An interactive travel guide app
• A digital window for our windowless meeting room
• And a Kohlrabi featured on imgur which we don’t want to talk about

So really a lot of stuff. And it’s not just the volume but also the diversity: from software development through digital art to using fabrics we had it all. We even have a handful of platforms and applications that help run Mito which was created during Hackathons.

And hopefully, we will keep on creating lots of useful, sometimes weird but definitely exciting stuff.

One of the most eloquent examples of these is the game called No Hope for Us. It’s a co-op survival multiplayer game that was created for a Mito Hackathon back in 2013. After its success in the competition it was bumped for release and you can still play it to this day.

And the kicker to this story is that we got an e-mail some 7 years later from Alisandra in the US:

“As an Agile Coach with a background in education, I find that people generally learn Agile concepts most quickly by being able to practice and play in a low-stakes environment. There are tons of Agile games that allow folks to do this in person, but in this COVID pandemic, I’ve noticed a distinct shortcoming of games that can be facilitated remotely. That said, I stopped looking for specifically Agile games, and began looking for games that fit particular criteria, namely:

1. Can my remote team join it as a closed version of the game

2. Does the game enable a sense of ‘sprints’ with pauses between sprints so the team can regroup

3. Offers adequate accessibility, has simple controls

I normally use this game after I’ve run the team a deck I have on what it means to be a self-organizing team, what the roles in scrum are, and what the importance of running retrospectives is. I first frame the hackathon that created this game in Agile terms: self-organization, working MVP, proactive communication, and a growth mindset when troubleshooting problems…the rest is pretty self-explanatory. :)”

So that’s how we involuntarily helped coach…with zombies. And it all started out with a day filled with boxes of pizza, infinite amounts of energy drinks, and a couple of toys we tinkered around with.

Did you enjoy the ride? Check out some of our other traditions related to our Life at Mito.

The author(s)

Balázs Dobó

Head of Group Communications