Aforza 2022 Hackathon

by [Ursula Brady](/content/author/ubrady/ "Posts by Ursula Brady"/index.html) | Aug 16, 2022 | Blog Post

Aforza is all about innovation. In fact, it’s right at the heart of our mission statement:

“Our aim is to improve the lives of every consumer in the world by helping CG companies to transform their product distribution and customer engagement processes on every channel."

You simply cannot achieve that by doing things the way they have always been done… If you want to transform something you have to explore new ideas and new methods. Innovation means growth. Innovation means customer success.

The beating heart of creativity at any technology company is its Research & Development department. So, with that in mind we asked our R&D department what they wanted to make. We asked our engineers and designers what they would build if they were given a day to work on whatever they wanted.

No strings except this: at the end of the day, share with the company what you have made and tell us how you think Aforza could use it. The 2022 Aforza Hackathon was born!

The event was spread over two days with day one dedicated entirely to the hack. We asked everyone to self-organise and left participants to assign their own teams, roles and strategy. Then, on day two each team had to present whatever they had produced to a panel of four judges composed of Aforza executives. The panel would then choose a winner by scoring based on the following criteria:

1. Creativity & innovation

2. Technical excellence

3. Usefulness to the company

4. Fun!

Build whatever you want, in one day

We had set R&D a challenge and wow, did they deliver! Some jumped at the chance to bring to life a side project they’d been working on in the background. Meanwhile, others were brave enough to try and use technology that they had never touched before. People worked together who had never done so before and there were some unexpected twists and turns as the time constraints forced ingenuity.

On August 10th, the Cardiff office was buzzing as everyone threw themselves into their projects. The entire department was packed into the office. Members of others teams even moved in to the office for the day just to experience the atmosphere! Dom, our CEO, couldn’t help but circle the room trying to get a sneak peek at everyone’s computer screens. A smile was on his face the entire time.

On the day we had six projects running in tandem. Each team was tasked with creating some sort of technical demo to illustrate their ideas as well as a presentation pitch. There were the teams:

Blockchain:

“We can use blockchain technology to protect our assets against tampering.”

Aforza Live:

“Live tracking of visits would revolutionise the Aforza experience.”

ARForza:

“How can we make an exciting and engaging augmented reality app within the technology that we already use?”

Aforza Rewards:

“Aforza should have a customer loyalty scheme to boost sales and retention.”

Software Development Kit (SDK):

“Continue expanding our syncing capabilities to meet industry requirements, beyond what the Salesforce SDK can offer.”

Automated Testing:

“End to end automated testing with Cypress is worth the engineering overhead for our new Digital Asset Management web portal.”

And the winning team was…

In the end every team managed to deliver a strong demo. It almost seemed unfair to declare a winner as the general quality of work was so high and there was genuine merit in each idea. Second place was attained by 2 teams who shared the spoils with an equal score. Meanwhile, the winner snatched it with a single point! And that winner was…

ARForza!

This team was made up of two developers (Alex Parrott and Nathan Baitup) and two designers (Jo Green and Cos Gherghe).

Since Aforza’s REX mobile app is built using React Native the devs focussed on building an AR demo app using the same framework. Meanwhile the designers investigated using Blender 3D modelling software to create assets for this app.

Finally, they created a design concept which would use the app to help our customers create product shelf displays. The most exciting takeaway from this project was that it proved that we could potentially embed AR functionality into our existing apps in a very straightforward way.

Congratulations team!

Looking to the future

We wanted to take a break from our business as usual and take some time to teach, learn and inspire. Our Hackathon achieved exactly that. We also learned some surprising new things:

• There are some hidden talents in our team! For example, we have some surprisingly good public speakers within R&D.
• Our ‘junior’ engineers are fantastic. We really do have some rising stars.
• We already have the tools and the talent in house to incorporate exciting technologies such as AR and blockchain into our existing apps.
• We are only just scratching the surface when it comes to what we can do with Mapbox at Aforza.
• Some of the things we do every day such as testing and offline data syncing could be made even better.

Excitingly, every single project could easily be used as a springboard for future work. Expect to see some related features inspired by this work coming down the pike in our releases very soon…if this is a sign of what’s to come then the future for Aforza is very bright indeed.