54 hours, 3 minutes on stage

In June 2024, Digitec Galaxus ran its annual Hackfest. The format: roughly 200 people, 26 teams, 54 hours from raw idea to working prototype, and three minutes on stage to pitch the result to the rest of the company.

Our team built Galaxus Snap. The pitch: you’re standing in a brick-and-mortar shop in front of a 65-inch TV you don’t want to lug home. Open the Galaxus app, scan the barcode, the product opens in our shop. Pick a delivery slot, done. No barcode? Even better. Photograph the sneakers your friend is wearing and the app figures out which model it is and what it costs on Galaxus.

Three days. Camera plumbing, image rotation, EAN-8 support, and a stripped-down home screen wired up to make the demo flow look real on stage.

We demoed live. The audience voted, Galaxus Snap won the Audience Prize, and one of the founders said, roughly, that he’d wanted this for years and please ship it tomorrow.

We did the right thing for hackathon code, which is not to ship it tomorrow. The prototype came back out of the codebase shortly after the demo, and the production teams picked the threads up at normal velocity. A barcode-scanner feature did eventually land in a later app release, well after I’d moved on.

Galaxus wrote up the Hackfest on their own blog if you want the company perspective.