HackDays at OpsLevel: Everyone Wins

Over the last week, the team at OpsLevel completed its largest HackDay ever. OpsLevelers demoed 15 different projects, spanning everything from our infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines to our Applicant Tracking System and assets for acquiring and onboarding customers. Even our CEO carved out time to write some code–though he admitted his UI was lacking.

The Motivations

In previous posts about our HackDays, we’ve touched on why we value them and how we’ve made them work in our current remote first world. Maintaining an environment where our team can feel connected and cohesive, but also feel empowered to work freely on projects that have piqued their interest isn’t always easy. But, through practice, we’ve gotten pretty good at it.

OpsLevel recently celebrated its 3rd birthday, and throughout those years has remained committed to HackDays because we care about having a culture that people want to be a part of. We’re all here to work, but in order to stay engaged, we believe people need the freedom, variety, and creative outlet that HackDays offer.

So HackDays are good for the team. But they’re great for our product. HackDay projects can take many different forms and contribute to product growth in a variety of ways:

• A project might discover a creative, more efficient solution to a problem that we’d previously bucketed as too time consuming to address.
• A project can tackle and solve an overlooked pain point that makes a tangible improvement to the user experience.
• Many projects seek to creatively extend the OpsLevel platform in ways that we hadn’t yet considered, becoming the seed to larger product initiatives down the road.

The Results

We’re convinced that HackDays are a win-win situation for everyone. Below, we’ve listed a recap of the projects (and their creators) that will find their way into OpsLevel in the very near future. If you have questions or feedback, we’d love to hear it. If you’re looking for a new opportunity and would like to participate in the next OpsLevel Hackday, we’re hiring across the organization.

• Mike: Interactive, dashboard-style filtering on Rubric reports. See above…click on those graphs!
• Chris: On premises repo file & search checks through containers running on Git{Hub,Lab} pipelines
• Jackie & Dom: Markdown notes on services–go beyond a short description and provide all the context engineers might need
• John: Team creation in-app from any non-matching values found in opslevel.yml & squashing the “paste a URL” bug for repo subdirectories
• Jason: Service level badges from OpsLevel in your README.md files
• Farjaad: UI on an individual Team page for quickly claiming and adding unowned services or repos
• Pablo: Drag and drop interactions with Checks on the Rubric page. Grab those cards and move ‘em!