November 28, 2025
Last Friday marked our annual Hackathon! A day where the whole team comes together to build, experiment, and discover smarter ways of working.
This year’s theme was “Automation can be learned!” and there’s no better tool for that than n8n. It’s a platform that lets you create workflows and connect a wide range of apps like Slack, Jira, and GitHub.
The rules
Beforehand, everyone made a list of small tasks from their daily work that they wanted to automate.
To turn it into a real competition, the jury, Susan, Tim, and Tom, assigned points to the tasks based on their impact on our work and on 9to5. The person with the most points would be declared the Hackathon winner.
We used a spinning wheel with everyone’s names to decide who picked which project first. The first name drawn got first choice, and so on.
And… start!
Once everyone had chosen a task, the real work began. Here’s what we built:
Our CEO, Susan, made it possible to resolve crashes even faster. As soon as a Firebase crash is detected, it’s first analyzed by AI. Based on that, a Jira ticket is automatically created and the workflow triggers Copilot, which then generates a pull request with a possible solution for the crash.
Tom, our CTO, automated the ParkMyBike contact form: incoming messages are checked for spam, forwarded to Attio if it’s a lead, and a Slack message is sent with the classification: support, lead, or spam. He also set up auto-deployment for Terraform projects.
Our app developer Dana ensured that every iOS deployment to staging or production automatically generates a Slack update. The workflow combines information from the code and Jira issues, giving the team a clear, easy-to-read release update instead of just a notification that the build succeeded.
For frontend development, Tim did the same: now, web deployments also trigger a simple, clear Slack release update compiled from code and Jira issues.
Thanks to Tex, our UX/UI designer, our support emails are now fully automated. When an email arrives, AI checks if we have all the information we need to help the user. If not, the AI sends a request for the missing info. Tex also set up NFC tags to automatically send Slack notifications whenever someone enters or leaves the office.
Julia focused on marketing. Posts that she marks as “In review” in the content calendar are now automatically checked for grammar and branding using our brand book. She also started automating the collection of marketing data, keeping all numbers organized and up to date.
Our working student Bink made grocery shopping for lunches and drinks much easier. The shared basket is now automatically prepared each week based on an Excel file with our favorite products, and any AH product links shared in Slack are automatically added to the basket. Super handy!
The results
At 8 PM, we gathered to present our automations.
There could only be one winner: our working student Denzel! He implemented PagesCMS to manage job listings and the team page on our website, ensured Jira issues are automatically marked “Done” after a PR is merged, and had already made significant progress automating a Slack message summarizing the week for everyone.
There was also a consolation prize for the “loser,” the traditional poop cup, which went to Floris. But no worries, he was already well on his way with analyzing crashes in Sentry, creating Jira tickets, and using AI to resolve bugs faster.
It was another incredibly fun and educational day. Huge thanks to Susan, Tim, and Tom for organizing!
