Klaviyo’s First Company-Wide Hackathon

It’s no secret that at Klaviyo, we’re always learning. From our free book policy, to our learning stipend, we embed our insatiable curiosity in everything we do. For our R&D team, this has meant dedicating more time to build out, test, and improve our developer experience and tooling. In an effort to expand our developer community, we decided to host Klaviyo’s first virtual and in-person hackathon, joined by participants from across the globe!

We believe that hosting hackathons is a uniquely dynamic way to bring our developer community together to showcase their creativity, build novel skills, and collaborate with other disciplines to bring an idea to life. Principal Technical Writer Shannon Ellam shares "Klaviyo's collaborative culture really shined in this hackathon. I had a blast working with my team and we brought a diversity of expertise - design, product, engineering, and technical writing - to a project we all believed in, and most importantly, was fun to build!" This internal hackathon was designed not only to empower our internal R&D teams, but to serve as a testing ground to launch a future hackathon with developers outside of Klaviyo (stay tuned)!

For this first broad-based company hackathon, we opened up the competition to three tracks for participants:

1. V3 API Experimentation: We’re launching a new API surface (if you’re interested in experimenting with these new tools sign up for the beta here).
2. Make Klaviyo Better: At Klaviyo, we’re only 1% done, so generate ideas for improving anything at Klaviyo.
3. The Future of Klaviyo: Come up with the next big thing to meet the needs of our customers across the globe.

The terms? 48-hours to hack, with the three top finishers crowned and awarded $20k in cash prizes, plus the opportunity to share these incredible innovations with Klaviyo’s leadership team for evaluation (spoiler: they loved them).

While we had only intended to name three winners across the different categories, we ended up with a tie for third place, and four winners, whose groundbreaking innovations covered everything from machine learning models to data visualizations to more seamless user experiences.

We hope this was the first of many Hackathons for our developer community both within and outside of Klaviyo. Will you join us next time?

Want to join the remarkable team responsible for this Hackathon? Apply today!