What is an ad tech Hackathon: The ultimate multicultural tech creative exchange
Let us explain one of the perks of working in ad tech and being in the team of one of the best ad tech companies to work for, whether it is in Barcelona, Dublin, or Porto: Our internal ad tech Hackathon! Our team of Developers love a Hackathon, but ad tech Hackathon projects need teams that also include other roles for their teams including QA, Sales, Business Intelligence and Marketing to ensure each Hackathon project meets the needs for a whole business ecosystem – Which expands across the globe! This allows for a constant multicultural tech creative exchange that drives growth both at a personal and company level.
So, what is an ad tech Hackathon? We held an ad tech Hackathon in May 2023 to unite team members with the goal of facilitating this creative exchange, allowing them to develop new ideas, projects or features, with the goal of furthering our company’s technological resources and enhancing our clients’ experience to continue to make it one of the best ad tech companies to work for in Porto! The event also represented a great opportunity for our team members to learn from each other, hone their skills, meet people and work with other colleagues with whom they would not work with on a daily basis. All our teams agreed, that this makes ExoClick one of the best ad tech companies to work for in Barcelona.
About the ad tech Hackathon’s multicultural tech creative exchange and our participants
Our ad tech Hackathon was held the past 17, 18 and 19 May. Our teams had to collaborate in a technical and multicultural tech creative exchange to develop a new tool or feature that they had previously proposed to a jury board. If their project idea was selected, they had these 3 days to develop it and present the outcome in front of the company and the jury board. Following the presentation, the jury voted for their favourite projects, and the winners were announced during the annual company-wide Team Building, which took place in Pals June 7th-9th. 15 Hackathon projects were worked on with a top 3 selected as winners and a further 3 projects winning special awards: Best Team Spirit, The Most Ambitious Team, The Most Creative Team.
Our winning ad tech Hackathon Projects
So without further ado, here are our winning ad tech hackathon projects
1st place: SaaSy Pay – Internal Payments Platform SaaS
Ad tech hackathon project: Company-wide internal API for payment integration, potentially becoming a public-facing product.
Project Lead: Darío Cavuotti, Senior Backend Developer in Engineering
Team members:
- Federico Fazzi, Finance Director
- Cristina Català Ramos, Head of Controlling and Reporting in Finance
- Aleix Alonso Manjón, Backend Engineer
- Luis Mateu Mateu, Software Developer
- Susana Deus, QA Engineer
- Vitor Duarte Rocha, Junior Back End Developer
2nd place: Customer Success Crusaders – Client Care Assistant
Ad tech hackathon project: ChatGPT-based Customer Success Assistant that can learn contextually, provide context-aware support and have fluent conversations, amongst other functionalities.
Project Lead: Marc Dalmau Rodriguez, Customer Success Team Lead
Team members:
- André Ayala Querido, Junior Backend Engineer
- Elvira Toumasi, QA Engineer
- Leroy Buratto Medeiros, Front End Developer
- Roman Sadovnikov, Senior Backend Engineer
- Tânia Filipa Da Silva, Junior Frontend Engineer
- Miriam Fernández Gómez, IT Helpdesk / Junior Sysadmin
3rd place: ProFileFiesta – Client Profiles
Ad tech hackathon project: Internal user-friendly client profile integrated with the admin panel or back office for better client data tracking.
Project Lead: Cristina Cubero Ovejero, Team Manager in Publishing
Team members:
- Bruno Bontempo, UX Product Designer
- Daniela Fernandes Pereira, Junior Front End Developer
- Gabriel Martinez Nunes, Back-end Developer
- Julieta Veronica Rivelli, Senior Laravel Developer
- Ana Sofia Barreira, QA Enginee
The Most Creative Team: Creative Crusaders – Ad Creative Optimisation
Ad tech hackathon project: AI-powered platform that integrates ChatGPT and ExoClick’s Admin Panel for generating and optimizing ad creatives, streamlining the ad creation process.
Project Lead: Facundo Colella, Head of Development
Team members:
- Juan Pablo Olivera, Junior Full Stack Developer
- Nicolas Rivera, Front End Developer in Development
- Ana Belén Serrano Alfonso, Senior Publisher Account Manager
- Lavinia Neagu, Director of Customer Success
The Most Ambitious Team: AdNirvana – Ad Serving POC
Ad tech hackathon project: Scalable POC for ad-serving infrastructure, utilizing advanced tech to decouple campaign data management, improve data retrieval, and more.
Project Lead: Bruno Pick, Senior PHP Developer
Team members:
- Kristijan Kontus, Senior Backend Developer
- Marco Muracchioli, Senior PHP Developer
- Sérgio Miguel Carneiro Sousa, Junior QA Engineer
Best Team Spirit: Team Rocket – Improved BI dashboards
Ad tech hackathon project: Enhanced BI dashboards with advanced data visualization and analysis tools for better insights.
Project Lead: Marta Expósito Ventura, Head of Business Intelligence
Team members:
- Maximiliano Vitale, Frontend Engineer
- Óscar Marín Sánchez, Junior Data Analyst
- Rubén Recio Cruz, Senior Technical Specialist
- Ruben Peñaranda Caparrós, Junior Developer
Here are the prizes that the winning teams and the special projects were awarded for their effort on this company level technical and multicultural tech creative exchange:
- Trophies for the team leader
- Medals for the team members
- Hackathon branded white hoodies and black caps
For the 3 winning teams we also got:
- An iPad for the 1st winning team, for all team members
- Apple AirPods for the 2nd winning team, for all team members
- A Google Home assistant for the 3d winning team, for all team members
Growth, creative exchange and collaboration spirit: The ad tech Hackathon experience
After the awards ceremony we asked our winners a few questions about the overall experience:
Give us 2 highlights of your ad tech Hackathon experience
Marta Expósito, Head of Business Intelligence, Team Rocket Project Lead: ‘When we got our Jupyterhub server running and working it was a huge moment for us all, and also I genuinely enjoyed our crazy Slack conversations that happened mainly in css code!’
Marc Dalmau, Customer Success Team Lead, Customer Success Crusaders Project Lead: ‘It was a genuinely intense experience with plenty of challenges which allowed us to collaborate on a greater scale multicultural tech creative exchange and to work on something out of our comfort zone with different people. The ad tech Hackathon required us to be entirely focused on a brand-new project for three days and to coordinate precisely and accurately to ensure we could deliver the project by the end of the third day.’
Cristina Català Ramos, Head of Controlling and Reporting in Finance, SaaSy Pay Project Lead: ‘When I joined the project I had a specific first idea of what I wanted to do with it, but I was pleasantly surprised when everyone shared their ideas and it all developed into an ambitious project that will have a great impact on my department. We have an amazing team, which makes ExoClick one of the best ad tech companies to work for in Barcelona!’
Tell us about your experience managing and working with your team:
Facundo Colella, Head of Development, Creative Crusaders Project Lead: ‘Everyone was great to work with and very proactive. We were a group that was able to complement each other very well, so everything went smoothly.’
Darío Cavuotti, Senior Backend Developer SaaSy Pay Project Lead: ‘My team was great and it was a fantastic experience! Even though we had a plan in mind I think we had the flexibility for everyone to jump into something that would be interesting for them, and was a great learning opportunity. We did a lot of pair programming and coding along with some meetings.’
Susana Deus, QA Engineer, SaaSy Pay Team Member: ‘It was a great experience, to get to connect with people that I don’t work with daily and to exchange knowledge to create something entirely new!’
Cristina Cubero, Team Manager in Publishing, ProFileFiesta Project Lead: ‘I think this is one of the reasons why ExoClick is one of the best ad tech companies to work for in Europe. During these three days I’ve learnt a lot on how developers work and organize their tasks, they were all highly committed to do their best on the project and deliver the tasks on time. And I got a deeper understanding of how developers make the ad tech happen.’
Did you get to work with somebody you never worked with before? How was it?
Leroy Medeiros, Front End Developer, Customer Success Crusaders Team Member: ‘Yes, almost everybody! And everyone is amazing – This truly is one of the best ad tech companies to work for in Dublin! It was awesome having everyone’s input and working together to bring the final idea together.’
Aleix Alonso Manjón, Backend Engineer, SaaSy Pay Team Member: ‘I had never collaborated on a project with anyone from my Hackathon team before, so it was a great networking experience! They were all really nice to work with and it was really good to get to know new people within the company.’
Ana Belén Serrano, Senior Publisher Account Manager, Creative Crusaders Team Member: ‘Yes, and it was an enriching experience. My profile is not technical so it was interesting to see how our devs divided the project into small sections to make the project work, and showed the real complexity in areas that I thought would be simple – It is a completely new way of seeing things and a different perspective for me! That’s what makes ExoClick one of the best ad tech companies to work for in Europe.”
What is an ad tech Hackathon? Give us an example of a challenge you faced in the ad tech Hackathon and how you overcame it:
Elvira Toumasi, QA Engineer, Customer Success Crusaders Team Member: ‘We had to work with ChatGPT and the Chat itself was a challenge! Learning and understanding how chatGPT works and how to train it to work for us took a while – We had to collect a big amount of data and format it in a way that the chat model would understand it. After all of this, you think the chat would just take the data and answer back perfectly, but nope! We had to train it and improve our data and learn all over again in a very small period of time! But we did it and it was worth it – This is why I love to work in ad tech! :)’
Roman Sadovnikov, Senior Backend Engineer, Customer Success Crusaders Team Member: ‘Fine-tuning the AI LLM model is a challenge in itself, as it’s a really new technology. I was on “terra incognita” and after some failures we managed to achieve some results. Also, it was a bit tricky to set up the web server and publish the prototype, but with the help of the infra team and some trial and error we managed to make it all happen!’
Vitor Duarte Rocha, Junior Back End Developer, SaaSy Pay Team Member: ‘One day, I found myself stuck without my work computer, which led to an unexpected situation. However, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise as I had the opportunity to engage in pair programming with my colleague Darío. It turned out to be an incredible experience that I thoroughly enjoyed!’
Join one of the best ad tech companies to work for in Europe and participate on our next ad tech Hackathon!
Would you like to be a part of the team and participate in our next ad tech Hackathon and other internal and external events or are you looking to work in ad tech? Check out our current job openings on our careers page for php developer jobs, senior php developer jobs in barcelona, ireland and portugal, or other developer jobs and join one of the best ad tech companies to work for in Europe!
