Earlier this month, we co-hosted a Slack event in NYC. After a successful Code Less, Do More Hackathon at the San Francisco Slack HQ, Teams from all around the city gathered at Slack’s NoHo office for an evening of tacos, bot-building, and awesome prizes! The event was open to Slack users of all stripes—even those with no coding experience. To participate, all you needed was:
- An integration or workflow use case that you’d like to implement
- A free Slack team and account
- Access and credentials to the apps that you want to integrate with Slack
- A free Workato account.
After an hour of networking and delicious food, the Slack event kicked off with a short talk from Jim Ray, a developer advocate at Slack. He highlighted how Slack has embraced chatbots—and how they use Workbot, Workato’s completely customizable Slackbot, internally to solve real business problems.
Justin Ng, a Solutions Engineer at Workato, gave a comprehensive Workbot tutorial. From navigating the UI to building your first integration between Slack and another app, Justin guided attendees through every step. He even explained how to create recipes that account for complex business logic!
Then it was time to get to work! Five teams had 2.5 hours to ideate, build, and demo a custom Workbot. Along the way, Workato experts offered support, help, and motivation.
At the end of the hackathon, each team shared their creation. A panel of judges from Slack and Workato evaluated the final products based on execution, creativity, complexity, business value, and feasibility. After much deliberation, they narrowed it down to three winners.
First Place: Creating A Better Ticketing Experience with Workbot
This winning team, from World Business Lenders, created several Workbot recipes that allow users to create and act on Zendesk tickets. Users can search for tickets, escalate issues, and respond to problems—without ever leaving Slack. For demonstrating excellent execution and clear business value, the team behind this workflow won $500 and a year of Workato’s Pro Plan, including Workbot.
Second Place: Streamlining Scrum Sprints with Trello
This team designed a bot-based workflow for creating and assigning tasks in Trello, posting them to the appropriate board, assigning members to the card, and moving them through the correct sequence of columns as their status changes. This team impressed the judges with their implementation, taking home $500 and a six-month Workato Pro subscription.
Most Creative: Efficient Ticket Tracking with Jira and Workbot
There was even a prize for the most creative use case: a workflow that alerted team members of ticket assignments in Jira and Salesforce Service Cloud in Slack. This team’s highly imaginative workflow won them $200 and a three-month subscription to Workato’s Pro Plan.
No one left empty-handed, however! Teams took home lots of great swag, including drones and Workbot socks. Most importantly, everyone learned how they can easily build a custom chatbot with Workato!
