As we grow and scale, we want to keep the innovation spirit every startup has at the beginning, and that with scale you risk of losing.
One of the ways we’re doing this is by scheduling a couple of days, usually a Friday and a Monday every quarter, for Monkey’s to be creative and exercise our brains to deliver something new, quickly.
We guide people to build something of value for WeRoaders, for Colleagues, or to improve the Development Experience.
On the first hackathon, we experimented with https://backstage.io/ as a development portal, and a few months ago, we went live with it.
Another interesting idea that has made it to production is an analytics tool to understand cost of flights, from the major European airports, to our major destinations, in the dates of our tours.
This allows us to spot very cheap and very expensive flights paths, and be able to advertise or discount itineraries in an automatic and data driven way.
On the second hackathon, we played around with algorithms for our rooming. When you go on a WeRoad, we generally allocate rooms to be male or female rooms, based on people that booked so far, but we realized that applying different algorithms to our rooming, we could improve our fill rate. We now have a better understanding of the rooming, and some ideas on how to make it better.
Another idea that we worked on was some sort of Spotify wrapped, that based on some of your profile details, suggest what kind of WeRoader you are.
On the third hackathon, we picked AI as a transversal theme, and had a couple of interesting projects:
“Al Pachino 🍅”, an AI assistant for our Content Management System, that help our content team to create travel pages and landing pages faster, with the assistance of ChatGPT.
We tried building Monkeys GPT, using PrivateGPT, we build an interface that can connect to our database and knowledge base and help us answer questions in a faster way. It kind of works… until it starts to hallucinate 😊, but it was a fun project to do, and learn more about what’s behind the AI hype.
