17 ducks pulled together to dream and develop five creative, ambitious projects in just 24 hours for Cyber-Duck’s third annual Quack Hack. Our teams worked hard across the Bank Holiday weekend to overcome challenges, aiming to showcase and expand our creative expertise. Have a look at the latest products from our R&D efforts!
At Cyber-Duck, we love to constantly explore and develop new ideas and products. This spirit of collaboration and R&D comes to the fore at our annual company Hackathon. Every summer, we join forces to compete in the ‘Quack Hack’, 24 hours of fun and hard work where we pool our collective expertise to realise some ambitious projects. Starting with a simple brief, based on a business challenge or opportunity, we divide into teams and aim to generate a creative solution, incorporating design, technical and business thought. As a sociable bunch, we combine the long hours of development with downtime spent with nerf guns, music and a traditional British BBQ, of course!
Have a look at each of our five projects:
- Arbot - creating a Duck’s eye view of Cyber-Duck’s HQ with an Arduino robot
- TxtNinja – an original tool for rapid, safe texting on the go
- Duckfinder - a web app for keeping track of the team when they’re out and about
- Caddie – a complex, technical web app to help us manage and configure our servers
- Flight Plan - a web app to streamline how we create and update project timelines
So Why Do We Hack?
In the last three years, the Quack Hack has undeniably become one of our summer highlights. We’ve found they reinforce the bond across Cyber-Duck as a whole, as an unusual opportunity for all individuals to work directly with each other.
As the perfect chance to experiment with new technologies and techniques, we often discover insights that are fed straight back into our business; be it a way of working better, or a tool that can help us be more productive. The informal, collaborative ‘Hack’ atmosphere can often generate unique, rapid solutions to digital challenges or opportunities. Often, products are even added to the commercial pipeline where they’re polished and released to the general public! For more, head over to Danny’s recent ‘5 reasons to host a Hackathon’ article for A Great Place to Be.
The teams take a break from the hacking frenzy to cook up a traditional BBQ storm.
Our teams were also live-blogging their progress across the weekend over on the Quack Hack blog. If you’d like us to apply our creative skills to one of your projects, please get in touch.
