iHeartRadio HackWeek 2021
HackWeek involves a full week of project hacking, team activities, cooking meals together, and more!
Our company takes the idea of a “hackathon” to a whole new level: software engineers, UX designers, data engineers and scientists, product managers, project managers, and more come together to make our products better. People form teams of up to four people, typically from different parts of the company, and compete for awards (both monetary and raffle prizes). The idea behind the whole event is to promote cross-department collaboration, the ability to work with people you haven’t previously met and to work on things aside from your daily grind. It helps our company establish a culture of creativity and thinking big. This annual event took place in Gatlinburg, TN this year, but we had people hacking all over the country virtually, too!
This year’s event, sponsored by AWS and MongoDB, was themed “2020(21) Olympics” and included ‘Olympic’ games such as corn hole, swim relay races, three-legged races, and others. We also held karaoke night, daily yoga, a murder mystery party, “sip and paint night”, campfire jams, and so much more! It’s a week for our whole team to come together to cook, hang out, hack on projects aside from our daily tasks, and get to know each other better. After spending the past year and a half remote (and many of us never having met one another), it was a pivotal moment for our company culture.
The projects this year featured a shared audio experience, cleanup for our infrastructure, the ability to communicate directly with live radio hosts, and more. The teams created video presentations which were shown on our iHeartRadio stage in Nashville, TN. Many of these projects will go on to inspire new features and fixes in the future for our app. The winner this year was team SpeakerBoxx, which gives live radio show hosts the ability to create content and engage more with their listeners through interactive experiences that build community and trust all within the iHeartRadio app.
This was followed closely by team East Nashty, who created “Pedalboard” as a new playlist creation feature, and the third place went to team They Live for their “My Radio” experience; this allowed users to broadcast music and live audio to listeners on the iHeart platform from their own devices.
Aside from the inventive projects, HackWeek this year acted as the first meeting for many people at iHeart. Many of us started during the pandemic, and had never met people from across iHeart, so coming to the HackHouse was an opportunity to get to know our peers in a more relaxed setting. We’re already counting the days until next year’s HackDay (coming in Q1 2022!) and HackWeek!
Are you interested in working at iHeartRadio and participating in our next hack event? Check out our current openings here!
