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As a fully remote company, we have always looked for ways to keep people working together. One thing that works well for us is to run remote hackathons, where our engineers get together to work on something unusual. These have been successful enough that we have made them a quarterly event.

We have posted previously about our process on our first blog post about how we got this started and our one in October 2020. We’ve refined our process over this time, and I’d like to share some advice on what we’ve learned from running them successfully over a year and a half.

It’s been a year since our blog post on how we started doing remote hackathons. So many things have changed globally in the meantime, but it seems that our remote-first working practices have been our best resource during this unprecedented year.

During this time, we have done other remote hackathons; the last one, which we did just a few weeks ago, was particularly interesting for the variety of projects that came out. Here we want to share a few highlights.

Hello everyone. I’m Roberta, one of the new product managers here at Overleaf, and I want to tell you how we recently organized a REMOTE hackathon! You might be thinking of broken up conversations over a dodgy connection, people not hearing properly what is going on in the ‘conference room’ etc. etc. - we’ve all been there. But thankfully none of that happened. In fact, our remote hackathon was such a blast that we are planning on making it a regular thing.

This Saturday saw the Hack4ac event held in central London, aimed at "hacking academia better together".

Overleaf / WriteLaTeX founder John Lees-Miller worked on mining and analysing article data from the PLOS Search API and PeerJ at the hack4ac event.

Now "PLOS Author Contributions" built at #hack4ac (& uses @thePeerJ data) pic.twitter.com/wr6H5Nv21V

— Jason Hoyt (@jasonHoyt) July 6, 2013