Follow us for a day of Recordly hackathon!

Hacking has been part of our DNA from the beginning. It’s part of our pursuit to pioneer in the field of data & AI. In Recordly’s 4.5 year history, we have completed 23 hackathons, which sounds like an insane number. Besides learning together, Recordly’s hackathons are about community, and about getting to know one another on a deeper level.

Traditionally a hackathon is a time-bound event in which professionals come together to collaborate on solving a problem, identifying new opportunities, or building a (technical) solution. The word originates from a combination of “hack” and “marathon,” i.e., a marathon for hackers. Often, these are highly anticipated events where people get to improve their skills, network, and have a lot of fun while doing it. Unsurprisingly, this description is pretty accurate for Recordly’s own hackathons.

Photo from our first hackathon

Recordly’s history of hackathons first started out when the company was just a few months old. At one of the first internal hackathon events in 2021, the team focused on learning about dbt. At our previous hackathon in February 2026, dbt was still one of the core technologies we worked with (check out our LinkedIn page where we publish updates after each hackathon).

Recordlians wanted to make these internal hackathons a tradition that we would honour several times a year, because they are great platforms for learning from colleagues and opportunities to test out new technologies together in a safe environment. For example, we’ve tested out creative approaches to solve our clients’ problems, which we then can later propose to the customer. So even if these events are days when most of us don’t do billable work, we still always keep our customers in mind while picking our colleagues’ brains to learn new things that can help us move forward in our delivery work.

Photo from our 22nd hackathon; the band’s grown a bit since the birth of Recordly hackathons

What does a typical hackathon day at Recordly look like?

It’s early morning. Depending on the season, it might still be dark outside. Someone’s already had their first coffee, someone else is desperately trying to pretend they’re awake, and the Slack channels are starting to get louder.

Hackathon day has a very different energy compared to a normal workday. There’s this shared excitement in the air: today we get to try new things together, build new cool stuff, and learn along the way.

Every second hackathon is organized in our Helsinki office, and every second one in our Tampere office. This means that for many Recordlians, hackathon days also include travel, and the train rides are kind of part of the tradition.

The day starts with breakfast together. It’s a simple thing, but it matters. Hackathons are essentially about gathering people in the same space. We then kick off the day with a short introduction: the available tracks, who is organizing what, and of course where the different lunch trains are taking us. Then the real hacking begins.

Photo from our 23rd hackathon in Tampere

Small groups form around ideas and shared goals. We call these “tracks”. Some of them start with a short introduction to align the team and set the direction, while others can jump straight into building. Sometimes the starting point is a problem with an unknown solution, sometimes there is some shared understanding about the result. In any case, it doesn’t take long before people are deep into discussions, experimenting, and getting their hands dirty.

The last “official” part of the day is where every track team presents what they’ve been working on and what are the learnings. Often, the most interesting demos are the ones that didn’t fully succeed, but revealed something new along the way.

Here, our evening activity consisted of darts and pool. 

After the demos, we head to dinner together, and usually an evening activity as well. And finally, tired but energized, it’s time to take the train back home.

Entertaining ourselves with crossword puzzles (a lost art?) on the train from Tampere to Helsinki. 

What do we learn during hackathons?

Hackathons create a rare kind of learning environment. It’s not the structured learning of a course, and it’s not the deep specialized learning of a client project. It’s something in between; learning by doing together.

During hackathons, Recordlians get to sharpen skills that are often hard to prioritize in everyday delivery work, for example:

• fast prototyping and experimenting
  
• cross-team collaboration and communication
  
• product thinking and problem framing
  
• pitching and storytelling
  
• trying new technologies without delivery risk
  
• building confidence by learning from colleagues.

Sometimes, our kitchen table is needed elsewhere..

The hackathon tracks and topics are built from curiosity, passion, and shared initiative. Anyone can propose a topic, and anyone can join any track that interests them. Usually, we also offer non-technical tracks for our non-technical team members, such as our sales and marketing team. The topics they focus on can be anything from sales process development to defining an ideal customer profile or developing our own internal company processes.

Some tracks are directly inspired by our own customers’ challenges. Some are experimental AI explorations. And sometimes… the tracks simply consist of topics that feel fun, interesting and useful.

This freedom is part of the reason why hackathons work so well for us. They give people the space to innovate, explore and learn without needing to justify every idea with a business case.

To summarize, sometimes our hackathons are about technical depth, and other times they’re about creative problem-solving. But the result is always that we leave the day a little bit better than we were in the morning.

Hackathons as an investment in ourselves

We like to think that our hackathons reduce long-term delivery risk by strengthening our own skills and collaboration. They improve retention, because people want to work in environments where they are trusted to grow. They create new ideas that often become internal accelerators, reusable components, or even future customer solutions. They also help ensure our consultants stay up to date with the latest technologies, so our customers can rely on working with knowledgeable, capable experts.

And perhaps most importantly: hackathons create a strong internal culture of learning. That culture benefits our customers too. And speaking of customers, we sometimes hack together with them too. Last year, Veikkaus joined us to build an AI PoC in a day. We’ve also hacked together with DVV - Finnish Digital Agency - around AI development related to DVV’s organizational and team goals, and more customer hackathons to come.

Atypical hackathons: Finnish baseball in Tampere?

Not every Recordly hackathon looks the same.

One of the best examples was our Finnish baseball-themed hackathon in Tampere, which we have done twice. Another hard-to-forget one was our Halloween-themed hackathon which ended in us beta testing our internally developed escape room game. These are reminders that hackathons don’t need to be overly serious to be valuable. Sometimes the theme is just a way to shake up thinking, bring people closer together, and create an experience that people will remember.

Photo from our Halloween-themed hackathon with an escape room game

Hackathons give us permission to be different, try something new, and bring personality into our work. And of course also to have fun while building things!

Why are hackathons so important for us?

The hackathons are a rather small part of the year, but they reflect something bigger about how we work at Recordly.

We believe that learning is not optional. That curiosity is worth investing in. That the best solutions often come from collaboration, and that building a strong community is just as important as building strong technology.

We believe hackathons shouldn’t be reserved for only internal development

That’s why we also organize hackathons for our customers’ teams. Sometimes the goal is learning, sometimes ideation, sometimes just creating space to think differently together. The structure changes, the mindset doesn’t. Contact us to plan your own team's hackathon with us. We promise you won't regret it!