Microsoft is planning to bring its internal tool for running hackathons
to the public next year, starting by allowing a few select colleges to
test drive it at their own events.
It's part of a plan by the company's Garage division to help other
organizations get better at handling the administrative side of
organizing marathon hack sessions like the three-day-long bonanza
Microsoft held in July as part of its Oneweek employee team-building
session. Known inside Microsoft as the "Hackathon interactive project
site," it was built to help 13,000 employees and interns work on 1,700
projects during the Oneweek hackathon.
Microsoft
Now, Microsoft wants to make it available more widely to provide other
hackathon organizers with the same tools it uses. The interactive
project site gives hackathon participants several useful tools: They can
search for projects to join, search for other people to work with, and
share code from the projects they're working on. Once they're done, it
serves as a showcase for projects that people have completed so that
other participants can see what their peers have been up to.
Hackathons -- marathon sessions where groups of people work on projects
that are usually technical in nature -- have become popular ways for
people to get together and try out interesting concepts. At Microsoft,
the Garage runs a number of hackathons every year around different
themes, including its massive Oneweek session.
Those hackathons are important tools for Microsoft's internal
development efforts. Project teams from the Oneweek hackathon will be
meeting with engineering teams around the company who are interested in
the technology they're working on so they can talk about potentially
integrating the projects into Microsoft's products.
Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures
Garage Senior Director Jeff Ramos said Microsoft also expects to get 275
patents out of the Oneweek hackathon projects, which included a system
for helping blind people navigate and a system to improve hydroponic
lettuce growing on the company's campus.
Microsoft's tool was created to make it easy for people to get together
and work on a project. Users can search for fellow hackers based on the
skills those people have outlined in a personal profile. The site allows
searches by both technical skills and non-technical skills, so hackers
can find C# programmers, database engineers, graphic designers,
marketers and everyone in between.
In addition to connecting hackers with projects, the tool also provides
easy access to resources that teams need when they're preparing to work
on a project. As you might expect, users can easily get to Microsoft
development tools like its Visual Studio development software and Azure
cloud services through the platform.
In the future, Ramos plans to include links to non-Microsoft
technologies like GitHub, Python and other popular development languages
and tools so the product isn't just parochially tied to the company's
ecosystem.
"So the aim here is really just to make it brain-dead easy for someone
to walk into a [hackathon], open their lid and start working on that
hack project," he said.
The idea for the tool came about when Ramos attended a hackathon at the
University of Washington. He said that when attendees arrived on the
morning of the hackathon's first day, they attended a small fair to
learn about the different projects they could work on, before having to
listen for over an hour to someone describe how they could get set up
with different tools. It echoed experiences he had heard about from
other hackathon attendees who also had to spend time on administrative
tasks before getting to work on their projects.
"It was like man, these guys are going to have to spend half a day just
to get ready to start hacking," he said. "Wouldn't it be great if they
could just come in and start writing code, and not have to worry about
any of that stuff?"
Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures
The tool was designed to be used inside Microsoft, but Ramos said people
inside the company loved it so much they wanted to share it with
others. Marketers and salespeople who participated in hackathons wanted
to let people outside Microsoft have access to it.
"I think it happened by enough people consistently telling us, 'This is great, can I share it with my customer?'" he said.
Ramos wants to test the external version of Microsoft's hackathon tool
with two or three hand-picked colleges next year. Those schools can give
Microsoft feedback about what worked and what they would like to see
changed as Microsoft heads towards a final release, which is also slated
for 2016.
Of course, getting this tool in front of college students also provides
advantages for Microsoft. The Garage is actually a part of the company's
developer tools group, and Ramos sees the tool as a way to get
Microsoft products in front of people early in their careers who might
not have had much exposure to things like Visual Studio.
"It's fascinating to me that when you talk to early-stage career people
about Microsoft tools, there's an information gap," Ramos said.
In his experience, student developers are most familiar with free tools
like GitHub. However, Microsoft has found that students tend to react
favorably toward the company's tools once they get access to them. The
company is already trying to create those encounters: It has a
"Community" edition of Visual Studio 2015 that provides free access to a
basic version of the company's development tools.
There's still plenty of ground to cover if the Garage is going to ship
this tool to the public. Piloting it with colleges will be a key step
towards it release, but Ramos said there's still work to be done before
schools can get their hands on it, including handling issues related to
privacy and drawing up license agreements.
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