It’s been a week since the 5th Semi-Annual Indeed Music, Food and Art Festival Hackathon and I’ve fully caught up on my sleep. How did it go?

Screenshot from IndeedFeed: “Best. Hackathon. Ever.”

Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned for putting on hackathons.

Tip 1: Pick a theme, but have room for interpretation.

Although it may seem liberating to have a no-theme hackathon, a few boundaries actually help people to come up with ideas – creativity loves constraints. Our approach is to have a theme, but allow people to interpret it as they like – or even ignore it if they have some idea they’re passionate about. Past Indeed hackathon themes have included the usual suspects for a consumer-focused Internet company: mobile, social, data, etc. For this hackathon, we did something a little different. At Indeed, our mission is to help people get jobs. Our theme this time was “Help People Who Help People Get Jobs,” which encouraged the hackers at our engineering offices around the world to think of their colleagues in other departments (sales, marketing, client services, etc) and how they could be helped.

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Tip 2: Provide plentiful good food.

Great hackers deserve great food (better than pizza and soda). And healthy food! That’s why we kicked off mid-day Thursday with a chocolate fountain at lunch. Oops:

  s/healthy/delicious/g

For dinner, Korean-Mexican fusion food truck Chi’Lantro set up a taco buffet. Foodies in Austin love Chi’Lantro and so did the participants. But it wouldn’t be Austin without some high quality barbecue! FYI: in Texas, barbecue (“BBQ”) does not mean meat cooked over an open flame on a grill, it means smoked for many hours at low temperature in a smoker. Fortunately for us, we have a couple of amateur pitmasters on staff. They brought a smoker and treated us to a whole side of beef brisket at midnight and another mid-day Friday. Delicious!

Photos: The chocolate fountain and brisket (not at the same time). Yum!

Tip 3: Get quality T-Shirts.

Make t-shirts that people want to wear. Besides great artwork, this means comfortable good-looking t-shirts in a range of women’s and men’s sizes. We’ve tried a number of suppliers, and our current favorite is American Apparel tri-blend.

Many thanks to Hans Krebs, one of our visual designers, who made the artwork for this hackathon’s t-shirt. The design depicts Indeed employees, wearing our trademark blue “I Help People Get Jobs” t-shirts, arranged to spell hack. But it’s also a game: find the 10 unique representations of people (hint: one has a mustache, one is wearing a skirt, etc).

Tip 4: Involve everyone, not just coders.

Not everyone can code, but everyone is creative and can make stuff. Our hackathons are more than just code-a-thons. They’re a 24-hour creative-expression-fest. For example, at previous hackathons we’ve painted artwork, including a giant system diagram, on the walls. At this hackathon we had non-coders learning to code (thanks codecademy!), we had a product manager direct a movie, and folks made some great oil-on-canvas paintings. Next time we’re thinking of expanding the art-side of the hackathon even further.

As for music, if you were saddened by the shutdown of Turntable.fm rejoice! PlugDJ is a great replacement – a real-time shared music-playing experience. Set up a PlugDJ community room for your event and send your hackathon participants the link. For our hackathon everyone moves into one big workspace and we set up loudspeakers hooked up to our PlugDJ room. This way everyone gets to take turns choosing the music, and people can vote it up or down.

Tip 5: Finish strong.

After a hard 24 hours hacking, everyone deserves the opportunity to show off their work. Teams need to be encouraged to practice their presentation ahead of time. We limited our presentations to 2 minutes, which is very short when you’re trying to demo something and explain it. To keep the 30+ presentations moving, we set up two presentation stations, each with its own laptop and projector. While one team was presenting, the next team was setting up their demo. This made for fast transitions, which everyone appreciated after being up all night.

The best part of this hackathon? 15 projects are going into production to help people who help people get jobs! These include a new internal Question & Answer platform, a tool for managing translations, several new reports for various departments, improvements to IndeedFeed, and much more.

If you have other suggestions for a great hackathon, share your thoughts with us, we’re @IndeedEng.

Indeed engineers help people get jobs. We take that mission very seriously, and we love that we get to work on interesting problems in an exciting, dynamic environment that encourages end-to-end ownership, engineering velocity, and data-driven decision making.

Every member of our engineering organization contributes to this unique culture. We’re not complacent about it, either. We treat our culture like our products, as an evolving set of values and processes that require constant iterative improvement.

In the past, we didn’t share very much about what we’d done at Indeed with the software development community at large. We were focused on our mission and constantly improving how we help people get jobs.

We began to emerge from that cocoon last year, when we launched this blog. Then, in February 2013, we began presenting @IndeedEng, a series of monthly talks in our Austin headquarters. The slides and video for these talks have been posted on our blog and are now available on our new site, engineering.indeedblog.com/talks.

We presented nine @IndeedEng talks in 2013. We poured lots of effort into these talks, making sure that they clearly presented interesting technology ideas and best practices for developing great software. In our early October talk, we announced the open source release of Proctor, our A/B testing framework.

The response to these talks has been encouraging and rewarding, with over 600 people attending the series in 2013. We have enjoyed testing the capacity of our “auditorium” (it’s actually our cafeteria).

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank every great software developer out there who has inspired us to give back to the community, to thank those at Indeed who have helped make these efforts a reality, and finally to thank all of you who have read our blog, watched an @IndeedEng talk, or used our open source projects.

We look forward to continuing our conversation with you in 2014!