Bold #InnovateOrDie AKA Hack Days

At Bold, #InnovateOrDie is the motto by which we live. If we aren’t continually innovating, we are dying as a company. Every now and then we need to remind ourselves of this. And that’s what #InnovateOrDie days are all about. They are 2 day software development or project challenges, where each member of Bold teams up, chooses a project to work on, and develops it to at least a working demo within 48 hours. It serves to remind us of what we can do with any idea we come up with, and how fast we can get it done, if we really sit down and put our minds to it.

Here's what happened this year!

Since day one at Bold, breaks in regular productivity to innovate, or "hack away" at something, has been part of our culture. In the early days we called it "Fix it Wednesdays". We would take a day every week, and just work on neat things we thought would make the company better. Even though it was just 4 of us in a basement, we knew it was important to have that break in our regular work flow to find time innovate. 

Today our company is a litte bigger, but we still make this a priority and every time we hold the event, amazing projects come out of it! This year was no exception!  We had 21 AMAZING projects completed, ranging from tools to help us know our Shopify customers better, a Counter Strike game modelled out of our building, Chrome plugins to make our search all Shopify files to speed up our lives, automated Slack bots to schedule the ping pong table, and interactive game to help our staff know eachother better! Checkout the video above to see them all. 

A big thank you to all our amazing staff who innovate every day, in every role, every department. Innovation is something we celebrate twice year during these hack-a-thons, but it's something we also live and breath every day!  

But there's more to it! 

These projects are fun, show what can be done in 48 hours, and are a great way to collaborate. Some however, turn in to big things! We caught up with one of the groups 10 years in the future in 2027 and here's what they had to say.