Scale Hackathon

The Scale AI team hosted its first ever Hackathon last month. The hackathon

was designed to:

1. 
   
2. Encourage innovative thinking to solve some of Scale’s biggest challenges
4. 
   
5. Prototype and potentially launch impactful projects that make Scale better
6. in practice
8. Facilitate long-term cross-functional relationships
9. Give all Scaliens a creative break from their daily work.
10. 
    

Scaliens across functions and teams leapt to the challenge, proposing 63 ideas

and ultimately working on 10 separate projects comprising of 37 team members.

Projects ranged from new product proposals to better internal search, from

refactoring tech debt to streamlining instructions for Taskers.

Project Highlights:

The following are just some of the projects Scaliens tackled during the

Hackathon. As a disclaimer, most of these projects are not live, nor do they

indicate immediate plans to build these ideas.

Super Instructions

Winner: Best In Show

Team Members:Shaun VanWeelden,

Taisia Karaseva,

Jeff Lin,

Galen Bertozzi,

Rashid Lasker,

Ivan Roumec,

Nofel Naoman, Lawder Paul

Problem Statement: Annotation instructions are critical for

the development of high-quality training data. Today’s annotation

instructions are mostly made on static, non-interactive documents, not

connected to the API payloads creating the task and requiring 3rd party

solutions to host.

Solution: The Super Instructions team tackled this problem

in 3 ways:

1. 
   
2. Extending the Task Schema used in our APIs to accommodate labeling
3. instructions.
5. 
   
6. Creating an in-app instruction builder that simultaneously creates the
7. instructions as well as the API payloads that would need to be leveraged
8. in task creation.
10. 
    
11. Bringing a world-class interactive design to the in-app educational
12. experience for those doing the annotating, including features like search,
13. navigation, and zoomable images.

The goal of this prototype was to re-imagine the experience both our

customers and Taskers have when creating and completing work on Scale’s

platform. We firmly believe better instruction design and more consistency

leads to higher-quality annotations for all involved.

Corp Search

Winner: Audience Choice

Team Members:Lawder Paul and

James Lennon

Problem Statement: “Corp” is Scale AI’s admin portal for

employees to gather information on on-going projects and to influence the

quality and outcome of data annotation. The Scale AI team has launched

countless tools and introduced new functionalities to Corp to improve our

operations but the Corp portal itself was not very user friendly. There are

now so many tools in Corp that it can be hard to find the exact tool, and

for new Scaliens it’s not always clear what different tools do.

Solution: Corp Search allows employees to quickly search

across all areas and tools within Corp, packaged in an elegant

"command-line" interface that can be surfaced anywhere in Corp.

Corp Migration

Winner: Most Immediately Impactful

Team Members:Diego Muracciole,

Federico Marcos,

Martin Cabral

Problem Statement: As stated in the Corp Search project,

Corp had become a complex and sophisticated tool used by many to provide the

best service to our customers. Many of the Tasker and customer-facing

features and tools were tied together or interlinked with Corp, making

additional engineering work more challenging.

Solution: The team spent the week separating these Tasker

and customer-facing features were separated from Corp. The team also

developed a framework to encourage internal modularity and code reuse to

enable faster deployment in the future as Scale continues to grow. The team

also ensured backwards compatibility with previous code to ensure daily

operations could continue. This project has already enabled several

refactors and performance improvements.

The Great Refactor

Team Members:Andrew Liu,

Nick Induni,

Steven Hao

Problem Statement: Like many fast-growing startups, Scale

AI has accumulated some level of tech debt in order to quickly deliver new

features and products to our customers.

Solution: The Great Refactor team looked to tackle this

issue by investing a week of their time to improve code quality to optimize

for long-term maintainability and development velocity.

Tasker Scoresheets

Team Members:Akshat Bubna, Rilka Li,

Alan Yu

Problem Statement: Although Taskers (our global data

annotation workforce) regularly receive feedback on the quality of their

submissions, it is difficult to provide granular feedback with specific

areas of strength and weakness.

Solution: The team developed Scoresheets that could be

accessed on the Tasker dashboard. The dashboard allows Taskers to track

their individual performance on specific skills over time and provides

learning resources to improve at weak skills.

Scale Grep

Team Members:Jonathan Fung

Problem Statement: Instead of searching through

command-line grep, IDE search, or Github search, which can be slow and

unwieldy, engineers need quick, interactive, on-the-fly code search that can

generate quickly sharable links.

Solution: We deployed two open-source projects, Livegrep

and Webgrep internally, and added automated index-generation so that the

code in our git repositories gets indexed every 2 hours. Now, engineers can

search through our large codebase in milliseconds and click code fragments

to generate sharable links to exact lines of code.

Facilitating Interactions to Foster Cross-Functional Relationships

In addition to working on impactful projects, another goal of the Hackathon

was to facilitate cross-functional relationships. Fostering these

connections when everyone is remote can be particularly tricky. How do you

recruit teammates to work on your project when you can’t organically run

into folks in hallways? How do you whiteboard ideas, or learn a new skill

from teammates when you can’t physically sit together?

Pitch Session

To help idea originators find teammates, we held a company-wide pitch

session a week before the Hackathon. Scaliens then spent the following week

signing up for the pitched projects and forming cross-functional teams.

Events and Activities

To help Scaliens develop new skills, we organized workshops throughout the

week of the Hackathon. Workshops included:

• A session on Storybook for planning engineering deployments
• 
  
• A session on Figma to understand Scale’s design resources and to enable
• better designing and prototyping
• A session on Tableau to enhance data visualization.

We also organized daily social activities and special events throughout the

week to facilitate social bonding. These activities included a Daily “Brain

Game” and a virtual Game Night.

To help everyone get into the spirit of the Hackathon (whether they were on

a team or not), we fully branded the hackathon experience. Our Brand

Director, Ty Wilkins,

created custom Zoom backgrounds, and branded swag, while Product Designer,

Chun Jiang,

designed our Paranormal Hacktivity mascot.

Presentations and Hackathon Wrap-up

Once projects were wrapped up, the teams presented their projects to the

entire company. A team of internal judges gave out awards for “Best-In-Show”

and “Most Immediately Impactful” and the entire company voted on a “Audience

Choice” award. After the final presentations, Scaliens gathered in a virtual

stretch session to unwind and relax.

We hope this blog inspires you to host your own virtual hackathon or spark

ideas for a hackathon that is in the works. If you’re interested in tackling

new challenges and joining a collaborative and exciting team, take a look at

all of our open positions!