The week before last, we had two on-site days for the AI hackathon at Free2move. I organized the event and also participated in it. I’d like to share my learnings and insights. The story is quite long, so there will be two posts.
💡 Idea
At the end of last year, we had a working group investigating how we could enable our engineers to use AI in their daily work. We ended up making the following toolset available to everyone: continue.dev +
AWS Bedrock. This way, engineers have access to a code assistant and chat right in the IDE of their choice.After some time, I ran a quick Slack poll and discovered that only 8 developers had tried it. Not cool 📉.
From another angle, I understand that generative AI and modern AI development aren’t just about chat interfaces — you can also use AI directly from code and integrate it into the product. That’s the part I found really exciting.
So I thought: what if we announce an AI hackathon to encourage people to explore AI? I brought the idea to the Director of Engineering, and he liked it. But he also had his own vision for the event.
A week later, this Director of Engineering resigned 🙃 which didn’t make the implementation any easier.
🏋️ Making It Possible
At the beginning of this year, I picked up the idea again. Before going to management, I decided to check if there was any traction. I asked people to submit ideas: where could we apply AI at Free2move? We received 21 ideas from 15 people.
With that information, I went to the new Director of Engineering. He liked it too. We agreed on the high-level format: a 1-month hackathon, where people work asynchronously for 3 weeks and spend 2 days in the office.
The DoE asked me to confirm with the business unit director that it was okay for people to dedicate time to the hackathon, since this meant they wouldn’t be working on business-priority topics during that time. I did that.
There was a general feeling that no one was against the idea, but also no one really wanted to drive it. I understood it would mostly be on me.
🤖 Hackathon
Finally, I announced that the hackathon would happen and shared the format. I asked people to join a new Slack channel and got 61 participants.
For the first event, I asked people to pitch their ideas and look for teammates. We ended up with 5 ideas. To my surprise, there weren’t many people willing to join teams. We ended up with one team of 5 and four teams of 1.
Over the next few weeks, we had two support sessions for hackathon activities:
1️⃣ In the first session, a member of the platform team and I prepared a service template that could be deployed to our platform and use AWS Bedrock. I showcased a simple Slack bot that could generate an image based on a Slack message. I reminded everyone that even a Slack bot with AI counted as a valid hackathon idea.
2️⃣ In the second session, I showcased promptfoo — a tool to test prompts and chat bots. I introduced the idea of testing AI outputs systematically.
Then came the 2 on-site days. I tried to lure people to the office with 🍕free lunch. Four people accepted, but only two (including me) actually came.
Tomorrow I will continue, sharing the results of the hackathon and what I have learned. Stay tuned.