Personal passion drives your best work. It also drives ours!

Fortunately, we’ve got a team of passionate people. And one annual tradition, in particular, helps feed that day-to-day passion within our software development team … Hack Week!

One week for each developer to work on his or her own or to team up with others to create something. Anything. Whatever lights their fires.

BombBomb Hack Week typically spins out a handful of production-ready projects. So here in this post, take a look into the future of BombBomb.

I’ve featured 8 customer-facing projects here, so at the end, be sure to vote for your favorite projects. When you do, you’ll get an email with all the winners as voted on by our team members, as well as 5 more videos of employee-facing projects (the hardcore, insider stuff!).

Among the reasons we like to share these Hack Week presentations:

• You can meet some of our behind-the-scenes team members
• You can experience a company event for yourself
• You can peek into the potential future of the software
• You can vote for your favorite project

Software Development Fun

Our VP of Technology and software development team leader, Patrick McDavid, hosted an hour-long set of back-to-back presentations. Each developer or development team worked all week, then presented their work to the entire company on Friday afternoon.

At the end, we all voted on “Best for BombBomb” (the software development project that most serves the product and its customers), “Most Fun” (self explanatory!), and “Best Overall” (also self explanatory!).

Click here to see Patrick’s intro to Hack Week 2018.

1. Video Editing with Zech and Charles

Video editing has been a long-time ask of customers. But most video editing programs are a bit too heavy and complicated to fit into our platform.

Here, Zech offers a functional sketch of a lightweight and simple editor that’s far easier than even the most basic editing software.

Watch his quick demo above, feel the crowd energy, and consider voting for this project at the end of this post!

2. 360 Videos and Photos with Nathan

BombBomb’s already supporting 360 video, but only with our YouTube embed integration

For a nice look into the future, Nathan’s rendering 360 video for desktop, mobile, and VR! See him demo it in a BombBomb video email.

Watch his video to see the bonus hack – a 360 photo viewer.

3. Video REactions with Jeremy and Michael

To improve the BombBomb customers’ experiences, we need to improve the experience of each BombBomb customer’s prospects and customers.

Jeremy shows off an interface in the video landing page that allows viewer reactions.

For your prospects and customers: Like or love your video. Call you. Schedule an appointment with you. Leave a comment on your video.
For you: text message alerts to let you know who’s interacted with your video, which video, and how!

Watch the video above to see how it might work.
If you like what you see, vote for it below!

4. Facial Recognition with Dr Ryan

Jeremy, who brought you REactions above, did facial recognition work during Hack Week 2016 (see it here).

Here, Ryan puts Google’s machine learning tool “Inception” to work on recognizing BombBomb employee faces.

How well does the model recognize our faces? Is Bitcoin useful? For both answers and a lot of fun, watch the video above.

5. Page Speed with Cheech and Thomas

Though this software development project is more back end, it’s got a direct impact on you. One you’re going to love.

Cheech and Thomas dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to load a page in the BombBomb web app.

Watch the video above for side by side comparisons of current and future page load speeds on both a standard internet connection and on a slower, simulated 3G connection.

6. Social Posts with Daniel

Heavily involved in social media additions to our Prompt subscription and the launch of our social platform with RE/MAX, Daniel pushes forward with more social features.

A “Social” tab in the main app.
The ability to make and schedule your own social posts.
The ability to run ads.
Native video in Facebook.
And more!

Click to play the video above. You’re going to want to see it.

7. BombBomb-To-Earth with Aaron

One of the driving ideas behind our company is rehumanizing the planet – by rehumanizing digital communication.

Aaron brings the world together in the BombBomb platform with broader language support.

8. BlastWave with Amelia

BombBomb specializes in asyncrhonous video – record and send when it’s convenient for you and people open it up, play it, and experience you in person when it’s convenient for them.

Here, Amelia takes on live, streaming video. Invite people to the video through BombBomb. Host the video hangout in BombBomb. Take comments and reactions kin to Jeremy’s REaction project above. Then, the video’s saved to your BombBomb library as a recording!

Like it? Vote for it below!

Vote for Your Favorite Software Development Project

Through the form below, vote for your favorite project!

After you do, we’ll send you the winners of the BombBomb team member vote, plus videos featuring 5 more projects …

Customer-Facing Project

Nate’s Chronos
(trim your videos, change video size, add video effects, all at once and all in mobile)
[Bonus: watch for the RickRoll]

Employee-Facing Projects

Joel’s Robocop
(safeguards the BombBomb platform and systems while we sleep)

Jase’s Tests
(improves testing and saves time with React component libraries)

Sven’s Several Grey Boxes (TM)
(adds layers of customization to our internal Admin platform)

Justin’s Local Dev in Docker
(reduces software development pain of our Dev environment not supporting Docker well)

Now vote … and leave a note!

See Previous Software Development Projects

Highlights from Hack Week 2017

Highlights from Hack Week 2016

(Fun Fact: BombBomb Hack Week started in 2015, but no one had the foresight to point a camera at it!)