At the end of May, CNC held an internal hackathon. Fourteen people from different teams, mostly back-end and front-end developers, took part. The two-day meeting had a clear goal: to meet in person, try things that normally have no room in the schedule, and find out what could be done differently and better. The result was five projects that are either being rolled out right now or are not far from launch.
“We found out that functional things can be delivered even within 48 hours. And that when you give developers space and trust, they can come up with and implement solutions that would otherwise take weeks to pass through the brief, product and development cycle,” says Milan Frýbert, who coordinated the hackathon.
From Blesk's AI girl to unlocking paid content
Topics were collected in advance, and some were suggested by the developers themselves. For example, a tool was created for AI summarising of articles, where you only need to enter a headline to get a brief but readable summary. Another was a proposal for a modern article slider inspired by TikTok, or a feature that shows users the articles published since their last visit. The aim was to reduce content blindness, which arises because editors put together the homepage themselves.
Alongside this, developers also tackled less visible but important things, such as refactoring some parts of the TMS, separating modules for easier management, or upgrading frameworks.
And then there was Blesk's AI girl. “We wondered whether we could generate an entire Blesk girl using AI. Including the picture and a witty caption underneath. And it worked,” laughs Milan. A simple tool was also created that lets you choose the number of outputs and deploy them to the website. Among the features closest to launch is a long-requested option that allows a paying user to unlock an article for someone else. Competitors already offer this, and it shows that it can help spread paid content.
Motivation and meaningful R&D
The hackathon was not just about new features. An important benefit was that the team came back to life, morale improved and cooperation was strengthened overall. “We met in person and discussed things you can't sort out over Slack. And the fact that in two days something was created that has a chance to go into production energised us all,” says Milan.
At the same time, it was a way to test new technologies or ideas that would otherwise be hard to bring up as a priority during normal operations. Whether it was building our own full-text search on top of Elasticsearch or considering vector search, the hackathon showed that meaningful R&D decisions can be made even at a fast pace. And above all, development is not about where you sit, but about what you deliver.
That is why hackathons will be repeated, once every two months. Travel and accommodation costs for colleagues from Slovakia or other countries are covered by the company. And the team is already planning more ambitious goals, such as rewriting the discussion feature as a standalone CMS module.
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