Archive for the ‘dwolla hackathon’ Category

A glimpse into what was built at Dwolla’s most recent internal hackathon

Posted in Blog, Blog Entry, company culture, Developers, Dwolla developers, dwolla hackathon, featured, hackathons for companies, internal hackathon, New Stuff, startup culture, Tech on August 4th, 2015

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

Screen Shot 2015-07-30 at 1.32.28 PM 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.

Dwolla invades HackIllinois 2014!

Posted in Blog, college hackathon, DevAngelist Rants, Developers, dwolla hackathon, events, featured, hackillinois, Integrations, Tech on April 21st, 2014

Last weekend, the first-ever HackIllinois convened 800+ hackers for 36 hours at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Two words: Nerf War

HackIllinois really pioneered in the field of leisure side-activities with the awesome Nerf gun fight Saturday night, which brought on a special game mode: Hackers vs. Admins. In the DCL building, which seemed to almost been designed for Nerf Wars, terminals built with Raspberry Pi’s and keyboards and monitors were set up in secret locations on each floor of the building. Hackers fought against admins to solve a series of programming problems at each terminal. It was MASSIVELY fun.

EasyMint

EasyMint allows Pebble smart watch users to make payments with Dwolla, request money, check their balance, and check payment activity! Dhruv spent the weekend building the Pebble app single handedly. The result left us in awe. Obviously, he won the Dwolla API Prize!

Spindl

Spindl aims to modernize businesses and municipalities with physical kiosk machines. Customers can pay vending machines and parking meters by sending a text message (Twilio!) to the Spindl service with the amount. Money is transmitted with the Dwolla API. Spindl also lets businesses set prices for their machines, so that each individual machine does not need to be physically updated with prices. They were one of two Dwolla API Prize winners!

IncenToLearn

IncentToLearn lets parents reward their children for learning and completing homework problems. They used the Dwolla API to process payments and Wolfram Alpha to validate math homework problems.

Vaporize

Vaporize lets you delete your online presence with the press of an Easy Button. Ready to run away and live a life of seclusion? This is for you. It’ll delete your Facebook activity, Tweets, GitHub repositories and Flickr photos. This was built by our good friends from HackMizzou: Dan Silver and Ben Sammons.

Honorable Mentions

There’s never an inappropriate time or place to deploy a hammock.

For the rest of us, HackIllinois provided a SLEEP ROOM!

Clock lets you inconspicuously cheat at school with your Pebble. No need to press buttons, just wave your hand!

Thanks!

Team Dwolla, being very social

We’d like to give a special thanks to logistical masterminds Matthew Dierker, Marrissa Hellesen, and all the organizers for putting together this superb event. It was a major success in all aspects. Hope to see you all at the next HackIllinois!

HackTrin: High School Hackers Move Money With Dwolla

Posted in Blog, DevAngelist Rants, dwolla hackathon, featured, hacktrin, high school engineering, Tech on February 13th, 2014

This Sunday, high school students flocked to HackTrin, a high school-only hackathon held at Trinity School in NYC. Though they had been given since Tuesday evening to start their projects, most students got started that morning at 8am and furiously churned out code until 4pm that afternoon. To our delight, students took full advantage of the mentors on site, which kept us heavily occupied for the day.

Prom Fund 2014 aims to, as the creators put it, remove the “awkwardness” from collecting money in person. For example, if you needed to pay your dues in order to go to your junior prom, you may need to track down the people responsible for collecting funds and give them exact cash, that they will then have to carry with them fro the rest of the day. Prom Fund tackles this problem by collecting funds online with Dwolla.

But that’s not all. They’ve built a donation recommendation engine to eliminate the common question of “How much should I donate?” By profiling the donator based on certain criteria (such as whether or not they are receiving financial aid), Prom Fund will recommend that they donate more or less based on their financial standing.

For simplifying donations and making it easy, cheap, and fast to collect funds, Prom Fund 2014 won Dwolla’s Best Use of API Prize!

Prom Fund 2014 with their prizes

We’d like to thank Virginia Cook, the President of HackTrin, (and her parents!) for working to put this fantastic event together. Ordr.in and Brad Burnham, among other folks, also deserve thanks for being involved. Dwolla’s stoked for next year’s HackTrin!

What can you build with the Dwolla API?

Recap: Dwolla Internal Hackathon

Posted in accounting software, Blog, Blog Entry, Culture, dwolla hackathon, dwolla internal hackathon, educational material, Favorite Stories, featured, hackathon, hr software, internal hackathon, kegbot, merchant education, merchant packets, team hackathon on June 24th, 2013

Last week, we kicked off our very first Dwolla internal hackathon.

From 12 p.m. on Thursday until 3 p.m. on Friday, Dwollans were given free rein to form teams and attack projects that had been pitched a week earlier during a 60-minute brainstorming session called “Idears and Beers” (ideas mandatory, beers optional). This all-company brainstorm takes place approximately every 4 weeks, encouraging everyone to share what they believe should be changed or improved upon. Ideas can include everything from improvements to the Dwolla product itself, to suggestions for team-building events.

Demos started at 3:30 p.m. last Friday, where we witnessed presentations on everything from a Kegbot to new HR and accounting software. Here’s a list of just some of the hacks:

Riddlin’: Post a riddle on Twitter, pay out the people who post a correct response.
Cash Mob: Support local businesses by arranging cash mobs via Dwolla.
HR Geek Out: Simplifying life for HR and accounting by making it (A LOT) easier for employees that get paid hourly to track their time, as well as make expense reporting a breeze.
Choose Your Adventure: Ask Dwolla merchants to answer a series of questions, then auto-generate a downloadable zip file of educational material best suited for their business type. The material can be used to educate both employees and customers.
Hack for Happiness: A culture book that will be used as a reference for new employees joining the Dwolla team.
Kegbot: The Kegbot integrates with a tablet that will use a flow meter to monitor the amount of beer that each employee pulls from the tap. When the keg is dry, Kegbot will divide the price of a new keg according to the amount of beer consumed by each individual, and send out payment requests via Dwolla.

Goofy prizes were awarded to the winners, such as this Batman blanket with sleeves:

Not only was the hackathon a great way for employees to work on projects they normally wouldn’t have had time to think about, but it was also an amazing way for everyone to get to know each other better – especially since we’ve been hiring so many new faces.

Allowing our employees to express themselves creatively is an important part of our culture here at Dwolla. We encourage each member of our team, no matter what their job description, to ask questions, provide feedback, and find solutions.

Do you have any tips on maintaining company culture and promoting employee happiness? Please feel free to share in the comments section.

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