Beyond the Office Walls: Requestly's First Offsite and Hackathon

At Requestly, we pride ourselves on being a fully remote team that thrives on collaboration, innovation, and flexibility. As our team has grown, the importance of creating a strong, unified culture has become increasingly apparent. This is why we recently decided to host a week-long offsite event near Delhi, where all our team members had the opportunity to meet in-person for the first time. The highlight of this offsite was an exhilarating hackathon that challenged our team to push their creative boundaries. 

In this blog post, we'll share insights into our offsite experience and the exciting outcomes of the hackathon.

We packed in a mixture of fun social activities, strategic sessions and workshops, and culture exercises, but the real highlight was the 48-hour Hackathon. Here's what we built during our Noida hackathon:

API Explorer

It will allow users to easily make requests to their backend APIs and test their responses, before integrating them in their Front-end applications. Users will also be able to test the mock APIs and rules right within the Requestly application. For users using inspect network traffic, the tool is going to help them to edit requests on-the-fly and replay with custom parameters.

RequestGPT

An AI-powered (read Chat-GPT powered) assistant that helps developers in understanding what they can do with Requestly by asking any questions in natural language. We used LlamaHub connectors to get data from online sources, used OpenAI APIs to train LLMs on Requestly docs, issues and restricted the answers within the boundaries of the product & documentation.

Templates Marketplace

It is designed for developers to build a great software with less effort. With the option to explore thousands of free templates to achieve more in development, testing, debugging workflows, and join thousands of developers around the world using Requestly to generate mocks, create rules, debug, and much more. Must-have templates for QA engineers which follows the rule: By the community, for the community.

Desktop App Helper

Using proxy module of Desktop App directly from Extension Popup to make network modification more accessible and powerful. Proxy can run in the background silently and connect to any browser with the help of helper extensions.

AI Page Analyser

The tool enables us to compare our landing pages to benchmark tools and provides targeted feedback on individual pages, offering actionable optimization suggestions based on the optimization goal we've set. Additionally, we can create a Linear ticket directly from the tool for the relevant items for the engineering team to pick.

There were many creative ideas presented. While every project was impressive, Vaibhav's idea was the clear winner. His flawless execution left everyone in awe during the demo, and we're excited to see it deployed to production soon!

Work Hard, Play Harder: The Cricket Clash

Of course, it wasn't all work and no play. After a long day of work, we took to the cricket field for a spirited game between Team Vaibhav and Team Sachin. It was a welcome break from the daily grind, and we were all excited to show off our skills on the field.

As the sun began to set, the game kicked off, and the atmosphere was electric. Everyone was cheering and jeering, and the competition was fierce but friendly. We played hard, but we also laughed and joked with each other. 

Shrey emerged as the star performer, getting some crucial runs for his team ( Team Vaibhav ). His performance was met with cheers and applause from both teams. Sagar, on the other hand, surprised us all with his hidden talent. He had always been quiet and reserved about his skills, but on the field, he came alive, showcasing some incredible catches.

This match was a warm reminder that even in the midst of deadlines, emails, and meetings, it's important to take a break and enjoy the simpler things in life. Playing with colleagues can be a great way to bond, relieve stress, and have fun. We may not have all been experts at cricket, but we were united by our love for the game.

Takeaways

All in all, it was a fantastic offsite that not only brought our team closer together, but also resulted in some exciting new developments for Requestly. By bringing people from different departments and backgrounds together, we also gained fresh insights into how we can continue to expand the features of Requestly and incorporate AI into our products. It's amazing what can be achieved when teams from different departments come together to work on a common goal.

We look forward to hosting more events like this in the future, as we continue on our mission to revolutionize the world of technology, one request at a time!

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