Heureka’s First Internal Tools Hackathon – 103 Ideas, 48 Hours, and Office Sleepover

We’re big believers in working smarter, not harder. Usually, all that energy goes toward building better stuff for our users. But this time, we decided to turn the spotlight on ourselves.

So what happens when you lock a bunch of developers in a room for 48 hours, toss in a mountain of pizza, and tell them to fix the things that drive them crazy at work? You get our first Internal Tools Hackathon – and, honestly, it was wild.

From a „Small Idea“ to a Massive Backlog

This all started right before Christmas. We sent a simple question to every team, everywhere: „How can we make your workday easier?“ We expected to get about 20 ideas. We got 103. Yeah, really. Turns out, everyone was eager to ditch repetitive tasks and make our tools smarter. The response blew us away. Clearly, we had more pain points than we realized.

How We Picked the Challenges

With 103 ideas and just 48 hours, our organizers – Michal Damborský and Jan Knettig – had to play favorites. Only two rules: 

1. It had to help our own people (not customers), and
2. It had to be doable – at least in MVP form – within two days.

Lots of the suggestions overlapped, so we bundled them into a few big „Master Challenges“ to make the most impact.

48 Hours of Coding

The energy in the office? Off the charts. Sure, the official goal was just to build prototypes, but nobody wanted to stop there. Some teams moved so fast, they actually shipped their tools to production before the final presentations. And „sleep is optional“ became more like a dare than a suggestion. Two teams literally camped out at the office, sleeping bags and all, just to keep coding.

Celebrating the Winners

After two intense days, a panel of our leaders – Jana Krajcarová, David Chmelař, and Lukáš Putna – judged the projects on both their technical chops and business impact. But we also let everyone vote, so half the score came from peers. Here’s who came out on top:

• 1st place: AI Strategic Merchant Advisor (ASMA)
• 2nd place: Merchant Feed Management
• 3rd place: AI Q&A (Poradna) Operator

The winning teams scored team dinners – and even better, exclusive HeurekaDevs merch to show off their bragging rights. Wondering how these new tools actually work? Stick around. In our next post, we’ll break down our Top 3 Projects

What About the Other 100 Ideas?

We’re not letting the rest of those ideas gather dust. Hackathons shouldn’t just end when the pizza’s gone. Ideas that didn’t win (and the ones we couldn’t even get to) are making their way into team backlogs right now. We’re brainstorming new ways to bring them to life.