At Dwolla, about every quarter, we kick off an internal hackathon where our team of developers build and iterate upon what they find intriguing and interesting. Basically they get a little free time and free reign to dig into something they’re passionate about, be it it a new integration, an improved tool for customer service, or a small bugfix.
Below we’ve outlined a few of the projects that grew from our most recent hackathon this past week. You’re getting a look at projects and hacks Dwolla team members explored on their own—not yet released in the wild, not yet live.
Which are you most intrigued by? Input is encouraged.
Hackathon Winner: Updating the Dwolla Button
Currently, the Dwolla Button launches users into an offside gateway checkout session. With an updated and improved button, developers are empowered to customize the integration more deeply. This hack provides a more tailored experience, keeping users on the website where they initiate the payment. The button can even be customized to suit the look and feel of the website in which it’s embedded—no longer is it an orange button for all.
Take a look at the button and the improved gateway (keep in mind, these are just prototypes):
Check out the current Dwolla Button
Smart Dwolla
Send money with Smart Dwolla—an integration that recognizes simple commands like “Send 5 dollars to Darren” and runs them as a payment. This hack creates an intuitive and user-friendly e option for sending funds using Dwolla, and all transactions report right on your usual transaction history. Pretty slick.
Connect your Dwolla account:
Then enter your payment command:
Detailed Transaction Statement Summaries
This hack focused on extending our current transaction summaries to include more detailed information for Dwolla users. For example, if you were interested in understanding how much you spent at a specific location for a specific month, the summary would include that (as pictured below). There is a debit and credit summary, with totaled amounts and transaction frequencies.
Take a look:
Check out the current payment history statement
Updated Hub Pages
We have recently updated the request funds flow to take advantage of our seamless offsite gateway checkout flow. One developer applied the offsite gateway experience to the current Hub page so that users could take advantage of the additional functionality—like Direct Account creation and more.
The updated Hub page:
Check out the current Hub page
One of our core values at Dwolla is: we are all inventors, creators and believers—something that resonates in the spirit of the hackathon. It’s why it’s part of our culture and development cycle, the freedom to create, invent and share has continuously helped us refine our current internal tools and business payment feature set.