First Place Winning Submissions Start with An Idea

While you might be filled with great project ideas, chances are some of them often get put on the back burner. Hackathons are a great way to merge skills, discipline, and creativity to bring those ideas to life! This was the case for recent winner Michael Bell, who saw the Digital HQ Slackathon as the perfect opportunity to dedicate time to developing a concept he hadn’t moved forward with.

Meet Get Together - Slack Hack 2.0, a fast and easy way to schedule meetings via Slack with a simple message. How was this First Place winning submission built? “Get Together's Slack App is built on top of our patent-pending scheduling algorithm that leverages a proprietary natural language processing model to enable instant, broad-based, in-message scheduling. During the Slackathon, we connected the “scheduling brain” of the Get Together API directly to the Slack interface in order to create a seamless user experience. We used the block kit builder extensively to model our desired UI within Slack and the App Manifest to ensure that we had all the necessary scopes, permissions, and event hooks for our app to function in any workspace.” - Get Together Team

Prior to the Digital HQ Slackathon, the team planned on building Get Together to primarily schedule meetings via text messaging, but upon stumbling into the hackathon they decided to switch trajectories and make the app a seamless Slack experience.

“Our team really dove deep into what makes a solid Slack App on this challenge. We have built a core technology at Get Together that allows people to schedule instantly with just a message over a variety of platforms, but making that technology feel native to each platform is a unique challenge. For Slack, in particular, we realized there had to be a great onboarding experience within the Slack Home Tab and that the Block Kit builder would be critical to making Get Together feel Slack-native to an end-user.” - Michael Bell

A once paused concept became a first-place winning submission. Congratulations to Michael and the Get Together team!

Do you have a project idea you haven’t built yet? Look through our current hackathons, and turn your ideas into reality, you could be the next big winner.

For technical resources to help you build a Slack app check out the hackathons resources tab.