Hack Week 2022: Together Again!
Another year, another hack week! This year was the seventh year that we set aside a full week to focus solely on creativity and collaboration and, as opposed to the past two years where we hacked from home (2021, 2020), this year we Hacked Together. The theme held many meanings beyond just being back in person together as it also celebrated our first Hack Week with Complex having joined the BuzzFeed, Inc. family. Our logo paid homage to this union with the three companies under the BuzzFeed, Inc. umbrella represented under the big “Hack Together” brick (designed by Angela Medina).
We also looked at hacking together from the perspective of technical and non-technical people, and we tried to bring in as many people from other areas of the organization as we could. It was so great to see so many people in our offices across the world again even after all of the time that has passed and the changes that have happened in the last two years. We had in-person gatherings in New York, LA, Minneapolis, and the UK!
This year, we recorded our first-ever Hack Week podcast! It follows Brianne and Patrick as they interview a bunch of different teams about their projects and their experience hacking together. The full podcast will be out in September, but you can listen to the trailer now for some wholesome hacky fun.
This year’s hacks ranged from new internal tools to super fun ways for our users to interact with BuzzFeed, Inc. content. And now without further ado, I present to you the fan favorite hacks of Hack Week 2022:
Catalyst Heartbeat Chrome Extension
🏆Most Practical
This Chrome extension utilizes CatalystJS (JavaScript library powering ad experiences on Complex and publishers on the Catalyst publisher network) to check the state of ads on Complex O&O to understand where they came from and how they’re expected to behave. This will simplify the debugging process for our AdOps team. When on a Complex.com page, the extension loads a list of ads that have been requested for the page and shows all of the relevant properties of each ad. In the future, we’d like to use this across BuzzFeed, Inc. and also include a feature that determines where the most valuable ad space on the page is located.
Project Team: Michael Karaim and Fiona Wang
CMS After Hours
🏆Most Collaborative
For this hack, team members came together from all over the org to tackle a universal problem at BuzzFeed: the blindingly bright theme of our Content Management System (CMS). Our CMS is used by hundreds of internal writers and editors daily, and when they’re using their laptops in dark mode and then need to use the CMS, it can be a truly jarring experience. But with CMS After Hours, you can save your eyeballs and have a little extra fun, too! After Hours offers lots of great easter eggs on top of the joys of dark mode, including a pop of confetti when you publish your post and fairy lights to brighten up your work environment.
Project Team: Steph Matamoros, Joana Caine, Agustina Varela, Malcom Mitchell
The BuzzFeed Genetic Test
🏆Most Creative
BuzzFeed Quizzes have been a cultural phenomenon for years. This year, using this new and incredibly scientific process, BuzzFeed users will be able to take the quiz experience one step further and use their DNA to determine who they were in a past life or which Disney Princess they are. This hack team was inspired by all of the COVID testing we’ve been doing lately and decided to bring a truly enjoyable test into the mix — no nose swabs required!
Project Team: Katie Tusch, Gabe Campo, Joseph Bergen, Clem Huyghebaert
AI Cuppy
🏆Most Innovative
When CEO Jonah Peretti was asked about what he would like to see from Hack Week this year, he said that he would love to be able to talk to some of our animated characters. If you haven’t encountered one recently, our animated characters include Cuppy the Advice Cupcake, chikn nuggit, and Weird Helga.
Enter AI Cuppy! You can ask Cuppy anything, from pondering what is for breakfast to managing your finances. Unfortunately, some blockers will keep this from being available to the general public, primarily the usage constraints around OpenAI. While Cuppy is just for fun, we’d have to add some pretty intense constraints to ensure that none of the OpenAI guidelines are violated, as users can be pretty unpredictable. While you might not be talking to Cuppy on your own any time soon, we can all take comfort in knowing that Cuppy is happy with how it all worked out.
Project Team: Maria Enderton, with an assist from Max Woolf
There were so many other great projects this year, so here are a few more:
BuzzCoin, so you can get a cute little dopamine kick when you do well on quizzes (by Judith Leng with an assist from Liz Frost).
Project Scanned Heat, inspired by Hot Ones, uses AR to measure the Scoville level of your hot sauce, but could be extended to lots of different products too! (by Pat Paluch and Bill Shouldis).
iOS Share Composer, so that you can easily tell all of your friends about the great stuff you’re reading on BuzzFeed (by Aljosa Cucak & Joseph Bergen).
That’s a wrap!
Every year, Hack Week allows us to break the routine of day-to-day work and collaborate with our peers that we don’t usually get to work with, and this year certainly did not disappoint. It was so much fun having Complex involved this year, as well as all of our friends and partners outside the BF Tech org. Even Jonah contributed!
Some projects will be coming to a BuzzFeed, Inc. product near you, and others will simply live on in our fond memories. Either way, the journey — not the destination — is what makes these projects a success, and by that metric, we can label Hack Week 2022 as yet another success. Until next year!
BuzzFeed Tech is hiring! 👋
If you are interested in browsing openings, check out buzzfeed.com/jobs. We have roles based in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, London, and New York with options for remote work!
