We've just arrived back at the office after spending a week coding on our annual hackathon get-away. This year’s Codecation took place at the foot of Sierra Nevada with beautiful surrounding nature and the skyline of Granada, Spain at the horizon.

The goal of Codecation is simple - allocate time to explore all ideas you don't have the time to explore while working at your full-time job. And that's exactly what we did.

This was our forth Codecation, so we tried a few new things this year to enhance the experience even further. Here are a couple of things new for this years Codecation.

Teaming up

Many of the participants have never met prior to the event. They may come from different backgrounds or have experience within different fields. We encourage the participants to prepare a project before the event so that when they arrive, they have something that's reasonable to pull off in a week. This however resulted in people having their own projects, scoped for one person, meaning everyone wound up doing their own thing.

We believe that being part of a team yields better results and makes the overall experience more fun. That's why, this year the event was kicked off by project proposals. Each participant was able to present their idea in order to recruit others to join their team. This allowed the participants to think bigger and carry out projects involving elements they didn't necessarily know anything about. Most of all, it made people join ranks and do something together - making the experience much more enjoyable.

Exercising

Coding for many hours straight is mentally exhausting - we as developers are well aware of the fact. To mitigate the effects of long sessions, we brought our own personal trainer to make sure we got enough exercise every day. This proved to be a good investment and the joint training sessions were appreciated by many participants.

Exploring

It's easy to forget about the outside world while on Codecation - that's kind of the point. Nevertheless, we wanted to encourage participants to go out and explore the beautiful surroundings. That's why we organized two mountaineering hikes around the Sierra Nevada region.