Optimizely Hackathon
To celebrate our amazing community of creatives, builders and thinkers, Optimizely is launching a contest for the person, customer or team who can build the best site or application solution that shows off your creative and technical skills, powered by Optimizely & our friends!
Calling all developers and designers! To celebrate our amazing community of creatives, builders and thinkers, Optimizely is launching a contest for the person, customer or team who can build the best site or application solution that shows off your creative and technical skills, powered by Optimizely & our friends!
For your hard work –
- Cash prizes (At least $5,000 per region!)
- Exposure and featured promotion of your solution as part of our launch of SaaS CMS
- A possible chance to present on our main stage at Opticon to share your creation!
We are calling for all submissions to be scored and voted on by the Optimizely community of your sample sites using our latest and greatest tools to help you build your best. To celebrate our launch of our SaaS CMS, we will be asking for your composable solutions utilizing the front-end framework of choice to build a sample digital experience that is all things dynamic, personalized, beautiful and most importantly value-driving!
- Contestants will be provided appropriate access to sandboxes and tools for their teams (or individuals) to construct your proof of concept
- You’ll be added to our slack channel where you can ask questions, get direct support on your build from our team and get updates during the competition
- Once your solution is ready, we will arrange submissions to be collected for our judges to begin the review process
- Submitting interest does not require you to submit a final entry! There is no obligation to complete!
Requirements: Contestants will be building a sample proof of concept site or application, to be demo’d to your peers. The concept can speak to any vertical you’d like (healthcare, financial services etc) and there is no minimum functionality required. The site must be available for judges and others to see!
Technical requirements are as follows:
- The site or application must use Optimizely’s SaaS CMS to store and use content in your build
- You must demonstrate using Optimizely’s Visual Builder to construct additional pages or experiences for teams managing the application
- The site or application must demonstrate using Personalization using Optimizely’s experimentation tools
- The site or application must be deployed to Vercel’s front end cloud (free tier can be used)
- The site or application must demonstrate one feature integrated with Microsoft’s suite of AI tooling – either Co-Pilot or OpenAI
Bonus Points will be given to solutions that demonstrate:
- An integration to a third-party solution in any form – such as Search (Algolia, Coveo, SearchStax), SEO (SiteImprove, Conductor, BrightEdge) or Data Transformation (Segment, Tealium, GA4)
- A POC generated in coordination or on-behalf with a real-life customer (submit and share your active POCs you are building for customers!)
Judging – Judging will occur in two phases:
- Phase 1: Upon submission, our team will review each submission on the following criteria:
- Visual concept
- Technical Complexity
- Usability
- Innovation
- Phase 2: Our top submissions will be chosen to then share at regional User Group events at the end of August, where the audience will vote on the winner!
- Phase 3: Our regional winners will be reviewed by Optimizely leadership to be chosen as our global winner, to then possibly share your solution as part of Opticon 2024!
Have questions? Email hackathon2024@optimizely.com
Frequently asked questions:
- If I submit interest in the competition, am I obligated to submit a final project? No! Contestants are not obligated to submit.
- Can I reuse POCs generated for other purposes? Yes! But they must be updated to integrate with Optimizely SaaS and meet other technical requirements.
- Am I obligated to travel to regional events to present?
No! If you cannot attend our regional events we can arrange to present on your behalf and let people in person vote for your project by proxy. - What regions will user groups be held – To be determined. For now, we are planning New York and Chicago but will adjust based on submissions. We will also plan to hold global remote sessions in case leading submissions cannot attend in regions.
* IMPORTANT NOTE Hackathon event(s) will be determined and planned based upon your interest! Signing up on this form helps us gauge interest in this competition. If you are interested, please sign up via this form no later than Friday, June 28. We will send out communications about the events the first week of July.