Last Monday, Phase2 hosted a distribution hackathon at DrupalCon Amsterdam. While we were excited to see what our hackers would come up with, we were blown away by what was accomplished in an evening of hacking.  The winners of the hackathon developed a Drupal 8 distribution called Drupal Promo Kit. This distribution allows anyone to easily create presentations and landing pages using Drupal. Other hack projects included Open Atrium Apps, Panopoly apps, and more. I got to chat with the hackathon winners: Kate Marshalkina , Konstantin Komelin, John Ennew, and Mariano Barcia, to learn how they came up with their idea and how they did it:

Q: What was your inspiration for your hackathon project?

A: We wanted to test our skills in Drupal 8 and see if we could build our own distribution.  We also wanted to build a unique solution that was useful and meaningful.

Q: How did you prep for the hackathon?

A: About a week before the hackathon Kate and I (Konstantin) brainstormed potential hackathon ideas. Our goal was to decide on a project that we could complete by the end of the hackathon, so once we decided on our idea for the project, we decided on the scope of our project and the minimal and maximum viable product.  We then decided on the tools we would use including Bitbucket, Google docs, Slack, and AppTrailer.com.

Q: And once you arrived at the hackathon, what was your experience working with other people?

A: When the hackathon kicked off, we announced our project and goals to everyone and found some new team members that were interested in what we wanted to do. John Ennew and Mariano Barcia joined us and it was amazing how easy it was to pick up and start developing with other Drupalers. We were able to start developing rapidly in just a couple of hours. It didn’t matter that we were all coming from different backgrounds, with different skill levels, we were all speaking Drupal, a universal language.

Q: What do you think is the value of hackathons?

A: Hackathons are a great opportunity to meet other Drupalers in the greater Drupal community and work together to solve problems. Hackathons at Drupalcon are special because your  team can come from all over the world, and you all have different cultures, different jokes, and new ideas.  Not only do you build friendships throughout the event, but all the different perspectives and experiences strengthen your project. Hackathons let you dive into something you are interested in and at the same time, it can help push Drupal forward.  We learned so much about Drupal 8 while working on this project, and we plan on taking our experience and feedback to the core team to help improve Drupal 8.

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Interested in learning more about Drupal Promo Kit? Check it out on Drupal.org! We want to thank all the hackers that participated in our hackathon, and can’t wait to hack with our brilliant community again soon!  See more images of the hackathon and other DrupalCon Amsterdam photos on our Flickr!