This summer was huge for the BigCommerce community! This August, we ran our first-ever developer hackathon, BigHackathon: Summer ‘22!
We wanted to encourage developers, both those who are well versed in the world of BigCommerce and those who are unfamiliar with BigCommerce altogether, to take some time to build applications on our platform that solve real problems for real users — for real prizes. And our developer community did not disappoint.
Let’s dive into a recap of the two-week hacking extravaganza!
The Hackathon
BigHackathon was open to developers, UX designers, product managers — anyone who could help put together an app on a short timeline. We hosted this fully virtually, which allowed us to bring together teams from across the world, spanning 3 continents, numerous countries and states. We had partners, non-partners, and even former BigCommerce employees submit projects!
Developers had from August 15th-August 26th to build an application that integrated with at least one BigCommerce API that solved a real problem for the platform. The prompt?
Your teams will be building solutions to real problems that BC customers and/or developers really face! This could be an issue you face as a developer, an app you think should exist but doesn’t yet, or a widget you know everyone will love.
These guidelines are intentionally vague so you can truly run wild — as long as whatever you build improves the BC ecosystem and interacts with BC APIs.
Our participants took this prompt and truly ran with it. We saw incredible solutions that ranged from management tools to help incentivize your customer to buy more to finding new ways to market products to customers.
The Speakers
Throughout BigHackathon, we had numerous BigCommerce employees spend time with our participants in AMAs, lightning talks, and advice-sessions about successful hackathon strategies, how to properly communicate about a product, how to design a mobile app, and more! It was really fun to connect our external developers, the folks who use our platform, with the developers who bring that platform to life.
Tommy Ekstrand | Manager of Web & Customer Self Service
Tommy came in and spoke with developers about a strategic hackathon approach with his lightning talk, titled “Hacking Your Strategy.” Tommy is no stranger to hackathons and gave our participants great advice about how to build and present a winning app!
Airon White | Manager of Product Marketing
Airon joined our participants twice with her two-part talk series “Build It & They Will Try It” and “Pitch It & They Will Buy It”. These talks walked devs through the product lifecycle and discussed the importance of keeping end-users in mind.
Roberto Alvares | Engineer & BigDesign Champion
BigCommerce engineer Roberto walked our participants through how to get started with BigDesign and how to incorporate BigDesign into their hackathon submissions. You can find the recap here or watch it below!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG9KgeRcgWU
Chris Ruddell & Dan Murrell | Lead Mobile Engineer, Mobile Engineering Manager
Chris and Dan hosted an AMA about all things related to building BigCommerce mobile apps using our public store management APIs! They broke down the differences between iOS and Android, what their team focuses on most, best practices when developing mobile apps, and everything in between. Read about this event on our Developer Blog.
Pat Williams | Manager of Partner Solutions Engineering
Pat hosted an Office Hours session with developers and allowed them to pick his brain about partner solutions, what kinds of apps users gravitate towards, what solutions he’d love someone to build for BigCommerce’s platform, and so much more!
The Winners
So…who won?!
We received significantly more submissions than we anticipated (a great problem to have!). Because of this, we couldn’t just award 3 prizes, so we added an Honorable Mention category. These six projects were exemplary and extremely impressive — the teams only had two weeks to build on top of their full-time jobs and lives! We were truly blown away.
Honorable Mention Recipients:
- Widget Builder | Amandeep Singh
- Translations App | “Galaxy Quest” Andrew Barber, Steven McIlroy, Matt Wooten, Space48
- CommerceBlocks | “Comet DeFrog” Tom Robertshaw & Tom Saunders, Space48
Top 3 Finalists:
🥉3rd place: Advanced Checkout Rules | “Not Quite TopGun” Manoj K, Priya S, Bhuvaneshwari S, Kensium
This app solved for an existing checkout problem that many merchants face. Kensium built a beautiful ui for store owners to manage checkout payment options tailored per customer groups.
🥈2nd place: Store Credit Manager | Travis Lockcuff, Jim Carpenter, MoJo Active
This app solved a problem for merchants who need to manage store credit on mass levels. Mojo Active knocked this one out of the park — their ui is beautiful and extremely intuitive, providing an excellent experience for merchants.
🥇1st place: Marketing Widgets | Scott Williams, Human Marketing
With the release of the advanced promotions editor, many merchants have been missing the promotional banner features that they loved with our legacy editor. Marketing Widgets not only brings this functionally back, but improves the ui of managing these and provides tons more customization options for merchants.
I want to join future events!
BigCommerce’s Developer Relations and Community teams have a lot of fun developer events, challenges and prize-winning opportunities up their sleeves. To stay in the know about what our team is planning for our developer community, you can:
💥Apply to join our Developer Slack space!
💥Follow @BigCommerceDevs on Twitter!
💥Visit our events page to see what events are coming up!
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