📸 Come take a look at our Codegeist hackathon camera roll (+join the webinar - March 18, 17:30 UTC)

[#1]

Building a hackathon project is never very glamorous. At Avisi Apps, it looked like coffee cups, laptops everywhere, people sitting on the floor, and someone staring out the window thinking...

So we thought it might be fun to share a bit of our camera roll from the past months while we were building Frank.

Because the real story never looks like the polished product announcement. It’s usually a group of people and some surprisingly strong opinions about small details. That is the messy, human side of building a hackathon project.

It actually starts with a photo from an In-N-Out drive-through in California, after a long day at Team ’25. Burgers, jet lag, and a casual conversation about how strange it is that Atlassian still doesn’t really have a built-in HRM tool.

Someone (our very persistent business developer who can spot opportunities with sharp eyes) said something along the lines of “Wait a minute, why don’t we build this?”

The idea for Frank kind of stuck after that. Though the timing wasn’t perfect to start right away. We were deep in Forge migrations at the time. Those who know, know.

Fast forward a few months and the camera roll gets very Dutch-office looking.

One morning, while discussing priorities, we decided to shift things around because we believed the timing for Frank was right. The hackathon had already started by then, so technically we were behind. But the room had that quiet feeling where everyone kind of knew this was worth going for. So we went for it.

Then the photos start looking like this.

Our cozy couch sessions, where half the team is coding and the other half is throwing ideas around Most of our best ideas didn’t happen at desks. They happened on that couch.

There’s also the classic “everyone staring at the same screen” moment that our marketer (me!) insisted on documenting. Every project eventually produces this photo.

One personal favorite: our business developer sitting on the floor during a couch session while the table slowly fills up with coffee cups.

There’s the moment where we realized we had consumed an unreasonable amount of coffee… and some switched to matcha instead.

And somewhere in between all of that, we also had to record our Codegeist submission video, which was its own kind of chaos, and a lot of laughs. Recording it took longer than anyone expected.. And then we pressed submit.

After that there’s not much left to do except pretend you’re not refreshing your inbox every five minutes. We were suspicious that we won something after receiving some emails and decided to make our Atlas Camp team even bigger, also getting a ticket for our marketer and our product lead.

Eventually all of that effort turned into something we were incredibly proud of. We found out Frank ended up winning 1st place in the Business Teams category!

At some point it also meant that rest of our team getting on trains and coming to Amsterdam, so we could celebrate properly as a team. Those photos might actually be our favorites.

Alongside two other great winners (Secure Notes for Jira for Software Teams and FleetOps Specialized Industries) on March 18 at 17:30 UTC, the three teams will sit down together and talk about how these projects actually came together.

If you like to hear good product stories, messy ideation, how get out of the messy middle to find the imperfect win, please come join us. We’re so excited to tell you more about the behind-the-scenes part of Codegeist.

🔗 If you’re curious about the full story, save your spot here.