During a two-day hackathon on 29 and 30 October 2025, colleagues from development, product and data met again in the CNC offices, with the aim of testing new ideas that could speed up newsroom work and improve the reader experience. Six teams worked on concrete projects. The result? Several prototypes ready for testing.
From idea to working beta
We kicked off the hackathon on Wednesday morning by choosing topics and forming teams. Everyone picked the area where they could contribute most, whether development, UX, content or data. Within the first hour it was clear that this year’s work would be practical, with a direct impact on the operation of our CMS and the CNC websites. On the first day the teams worked until the evening, followed by informal networking and sharing of insights. On Thursday, the work continued with debugging and testing.
Projects that save time and data
One part of the team focused on previewing articles in the mobile layout directly in the CMS, a feature our newsrooms have long prioritised. The goal was to deploy it to beta during the hackathon and prepare it for production. A second group built an API for forms in RING CMS and tested a lightweight Vue.js application for displaying data. A third team tackled image optimisation according to the sizes used and the needs of the front end, so that websites load faster.
A new feature we completed is a pilot option to pay for a single article via GoPay, without buying a full subscription. Among smaller but meaningful wins are improvements to metrics on Auto.cz, a pseudo infinite scroll for Blesk.cz, and work on sharing an unlocked article, which builds on the spring hackathon.
Testing, measuring, improving
Our approach was once again to “try, measure, tune”. Teams documented their processes, prepared the first test data and shared findings across the newsrooms. We closed the hackathon with a presentation of the outputs, in which the teams showed working prototypes and concrete plans for next steps. It became clear that big progress often rests on small details. Even something as simple as optimising image sizes in a gallery can significantly speed up a website and improve how readable the content is.
A shared space for experimentation
Over two days, proposals took shape that will gradually flow into the editorial tools and the user interface. Besides the outputs, the hackathon also gave the whole team a unique experience, a space for experimenting and sharing. For the third time, the hackathon proved that when a team with a clear goal and 100% focus sits around one table, ideas quickly turn into concrete solutions.
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