Last month was witness to another Hack&Talk (or: LiveChat Hackathon, in its previous form), where people’s innovative ideas for online communication are transformed into working solutions. All of that in 10 hours of intense work and team cooperation!

A lot has changed since the last Hackathon – including the name, and overall convention. The 4th edition of LiveChat Hack&Talk took place on March 24th 2018, at LiveChat’s new office.

With Hack&Talk, we want to meet people passionate about building online products. It’s not just about coding – it’s a networking event where we can all exchange ideas on how product companies should work to bring value to their customers.

—Bartosz Olchówka, CPO at LiveChat

We can state it as a fact that any company can benefit from hosting hackathons. It can become a real forum for people and their ideas, which equals promotion, innovation, as well as fantastic opportunities that come along. And it’s just super fun!

There were 26 teams and 56 participants total present, and, oh my – there was a lot going on. 19 teams endured the hardships of the day-long hackathon, and managed to present their projects.

1st Award

The 1st award went to the team Seals (not the Navy Team Six, but still!), Viktoria Tryshchenko and Oleksandr Tryshchenko, who created dynamic forms in chats for business talks.

Basing on a sample chat application for legal cases, we created a mechanism which allows lawyers to request different kinds of data as a form. The lawyer writes what data he needs from the user, and the system recognizes the context with a special algorithm. As the result, the client gets a pop-up with form which is built dynamically based on  the request. The client then submits the form, and the lawyer receives structured data.

The biggest challenge was the time limit. We had to build a working chat and implement those forms in 10 hours. We were using following technologies for the prototype: Angular 5, Cordova, Node.js and socket.io for the server end. This stack allowed us to leverage web sockets and reactive forms very efficiently, save time and deliver a proof of concept in the limited time.

Another big challenge was the presentation. We strongly believe that even a basic proof-of-concept version should look good, so we also invested time in design, markup and some basic UX.

—Oleksandr Tryshchenko, Team Seals – 1st Award

Retrospecting: the 1st Award at the previous Hackathon went to the project that was bringing LiveChat into VR.

2nd Award

The 2nd award was presented to team foLC, in the person of Andrzej Samek, for integrating LiveChat with Trigger.to, his own project. This allows the users to connect to a support team directly from the real world, using a specially crafted “trigger” object.

LiveChat Hack&Talk in short: cool people, friendly atmosphere, and nice networking! The event was a great opportunity to share our vision of communication in the future, and it’s this: we want the customers to be able to start a live chat with the support team directly from the real world. They only need an NFC-enabled smartphone.

During the 10 hours of coding at Hack&Talk we integrated trigger.to with LiveChat, creating Tap&Chat. Here is the result:

Looks interesting? Stay tuned, release is around the corner.

—Andrzej Samek, Founder of Trigger.to – 2nd Award

We much encourage you to follow Andrzej’s project at trigger.to – it will be live in no time, and you’ll be able to try and use this integration yourself.

3rd Award

One other team was formed “on the fly”, during the event, by three individuals working separately (one-man teams). The cool part is, that team eventually managed to get the 3rd Award. These guys were Szymon Graczyk, Mateusz Pliszka (they both soon join us in the office!) and Chrystian Schutz.

The team’s project was to create a LiveChat integration with Google Maps, which would let the local businesses to communicate with their clients based on device location – chatting with a small shop’s or restaurant’s staff would be just one click away.

What I liked most about LiveChat’s Hackathon was the opportunity to meet and work with interesting new individuals, free choice of the task which stimulated creativity, and the comfy atmosphere that accompanied the event.

There was a lot of interesting things going on, and I will well remember observing a holographic projection of LiveChat’s logo, and also one of the organizers who was greeting the guests with a blaster rifle, and wearing a stormtrooper suit!

True that!What is worth noting out is that I handled the marketing part in my team, and am not a programmer myself. It’s often worth to try and participate in such event even without technical skills and knowledge in programming.

—Mateusz Pliszka, Co-founder of PickSaaS.com – 3rd Award

This edition of Hack&Talk set a new high for the number of people that turned up to participate and share their ideas, and made us wish to make it even bigger with the next event.

Congratulations to all of the winners!

We plan to invite special guests for the next edition, so stay tuned, and visit hackandtalk.io!

New to hackathons? Get ready now!

If you’re new to hackathons, and would like to dig right into it, go right ahead and learn How to Prepare for Your First Hackathon.

Also check out The Hackathon Handbook, and we’re hoping to see you soon at the next Hack&Talk!