Best of Hack Week 2020
We recently wrapped up our 2020 Hack Week, appropriately themed “Hacking from Home”. Even though our tech teams are 100% remote, that didn’t stop us from working together to design, build, and (mostly) ship our hacks within a single week! We saw a wide variety of projects from site features to internal tools to hardware. In total, 16 groups completed and demoed hacks to the entire company in a 100+ person Google Hangout. Here are some of the fan favorites!
Juice Rewards
If you weren’t already addicted to BuzzFeed.com, we’ve now got a gadget that dispenses delicious juice to reward users for interactions on our site. We built, programmed, and tested the juice delivery mechanism in hopes of increasing user retention and engagement. Even if this feature isn’t released to the public yet, rest assured we will be using it internally to reward our teams for all of the cool things we’ve been building.
Project Team: Paul Curry & company
Blue Check
We were inspired by recent social justice movements to create an organized database of crowdsourced videos to call attention to police misconduct. Chances are, you’ve seen videos of police misconduct in your social feeds, but what do you do about it? With Blue Check, you can upload and browse videos of police misconduct in your location, provide and see information about who your representatives are, and steps you can take to push your elected leaders to take action!
Project Team: Rico Moorer, Tami Olafunmiloye, Gabe Campo, Mireille Keuroghlian
BF Paint
It has become a custom for our tech team to gather for an online game of Pictionary every Friday. However, we had several qualms with our Pictionary platform of choice (including limits to number of players and lack of Windows 98 vibes), so we decided to build our own. Introducing BF Paint — endearingly named and themed after MS Paint. Some of our favorite features include the Painty (Clippy’s canonical second cousin) avatars, persistent leaderboard and game records, AI-powered image scoring, and text detection!
Project Team: Plum Ertz, Caroline Amaba, Maria Enderton, Judith Leng, John Phillips, Estefania Reichel
Digital Plant
The days of virtual pets are no more. Introducing Digital Plant, a virtual plant that lives on your very own BuzzFeed.com user profile! Given lots of love, water, and fertilizer, it will evolve into different types of larger plants!
Project Team: Sam Thurman, Devin Argenta, Jigna Lad, Lisa Maldonado, Lizzy Grillo, Milan Samuel, Malcolm Mitchell, Reina Hoshino
BF Design System
A team of designers and engineers collaborated on a tiered and component-based design system to allow for code consistency across products but also encourage visual flexibility. Sometimes we have sponsored homepage takeovers that require design and dev work, and this token based system would make it super easy to just plug in the variables and go! BuzzFeed.com dark theme, anyone?
Project Team: Suleiman Shakir, Jonathan Ginter, Angela Medina
Armagitton
Arma-git-ton is a retro 2D shooter arcade game where you take down hostile files straight from our GitHub repository! Face off against files of all types from Python to JavaScript to Go to Perl. And the best — or maybe the worst — part? Every file you take down is deleted from our repository. Play this game too much, and we’ll all be out of jobs…
Project Team: Liz Frost
Find out what else BuzzFeed Tech is up to by following our Twitter, @buzzfeedexp!
Also, we’re hiring! If you are interested in browsing openings, check out buzzfeed.com/jobs.
