Hackat-ON! Perfecting a UI Library

We put our heads together at an internal hackathon at the beginning of the fall and decided to put work into our front-end. The goal was clear: Transform the shared Heureka Group UI library to make it simpler for everyone that will develop or work with it in the future. That, and more…

Our other tasks included:

• Improve website performance
• Simplify the use of the shared CDN for our UI library
• Refactoring – moving to new technology
• Copying the UI library to TypeScript
• Moving to a Sass model
• Moving to monorepo – separated into more libraries (styles, icons, components)
• These were supplemented by adjustments in local projects that await us
• Re-work as many React components so each HTML implementation has its own React alternative
• Incorporate the infrastructure team into production using a shared CDN

How did we work?

• We separated into 3 teams, two on-site and one online
• We held regular stand-ups once every three hours
• We used Miro to where we created a roadmap to track the processes of each team

What were the benefits?

• It helped us with OKR for the next quarter where we will focus on moving our UI library into the cloud
• We improved the UI library so all teams could work with it much more simpler

Internal hackathons have the advantage that they help focus the team’s attention to the most important tasks. In our case, we also tested the agility of our front-end group that meets once a month and where we discuss our front-end and educate one another. We also significantly improved knowledge sharing with our Hungarian colleagues.

The final result isn’t finished yet, which is why we’re preparing another edition of our internal hackathon.