Making Downtime Count: Hackathon fun leads to increased productivity

Get your hands on all sorts of great productivity boosting code, courtesy of Ekreative’s in-house hackathon funday!

Need more time?

Do you find you have bucket loads of great ideas, but they always arrive at just the wrong moment? A great way to improve your productivity, but it requires a bit of set up time, which you just don’t have right now? Maybe you thought of a new approach to an old task, but trying it out would take up too much valuable work time and it’s not 100% certain it would go as planned? Sometimes it can even be frustrating to think of how much more efficiently we could be working, if only we had a bit of extra time to set things up, or to experiment with our wilder ideas.

Putting things right

On Saturday, Ekreative put these frustrations temporarily to rest, by deciding to go productively wild, with an in house, twelve hour, energy drink fueled, hackathon, code party (#ekreativehackday15). It was an opportunity to put in the setup time for novel, time saving apps and sites and for all the team to input their own great ideas for how Ekreative can function even better.

Skype call archiving system

The large majority of the ideas were immensely practical, like a system for recording and archiving all company skype calls. By labelling calls in the archive with identifying information such as the time and the participants of the conversation, this idea now enables us to easily search for and find past conversations, to go back over everything that’s been discussed with our clients.

Automatic estimation calculator

Another great, practical idea, is the app estimator project, which uses a selection of drop down inputs containing common app features to help quickly assess the approximate time needed to produce most of the usual types of app. Speeding up the quote giving stage of the development process and freeing up developers to carry on doing what they do best!

Sharing makes us happy

A couple of weeks ago we announced the release of a similarly handy bit of code in the form of Testflight replacement service “Testbuild.rocks”. Whilst Saturday’s hackathon also produced an updated version of Testbuild.rocks, (which has gone straight up on Github), many of the other ideas we worked on on Saturday are also such useful little extra’s, that we want to make them available to everyone too!

Worth coming back!

That’s why over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be introducing several more totally free handy productivity solutions, straight from the Ekreative team. From an easy setup, custom vendor service selection and payment system, to an intuitive virtual suggestion box and much, much more. So come back soon and keep your eyes peeled for new productivity releases both here at the blog and on the ekreative Github account!