Highlights from the spectacular Mattermost Hackathon
Following the record-breaking Hacktoberfest that saw more than 200 contributions to Mattermost in October, we held a virtual hackathon November 22–26.
Over the five-day period, 45 members from our open source community, including contributors and staff, created amazing features and plugins for Mattermost.
We were all impressed by the Mattermost Hackathon presentations last week—wow! It’s amazing to be part of such an innovative community, and many thanks to everyone who participated in the event.
To learn more about what our community built, check out all Hackathon projects on GitHub or keep reading to see the highlights of the event.
Please note that the features and plugins listed below have not shipped with Mattermost, and may not. However, the product team is actively working with the submitters to scope remaining work and determine what makes sense to ship as a core feature or a certified plugin.
Integrations
A new Google Calendar plugin for Mattermost routes notifications from Google Calendar to Mattermost, giving you the ability to receive and instantly reply to meeting requests.
The plugin also lets you create and delete calendar events from Mattermost.
Additionally, you’re able to get upcoming calendar events and a summary of daily meetings.
Lastly, when you’re in a meeting, your Mattermost status automatically sets to “Do Not Disturb.”
Great work on this, Hossein Ahmadian-Yazdi!
Other integrations that were created include:
| Name | Description | Contributor |
| Bamboo HR plugin for Mattermost | Manage HR-related activities, such as onboarding and offboarding, in Mattermost | Allan Guwatudde |
| Calendar plugin powered by Cronofy for Mattermost | View upcoming events, reply to calendar invites, and update status based on current availability | Michael Kochell |
| Circle CI plugin for Mattermost | Send and receive build updates via Circle CI | Chetanya Kandhari |
| Google Play reviews plugin for Mattermost | Route app reviews directly into a Mattermost channel | larkox |
| Grafana panels | Integrate Grafana within Mattermost channels | Mario de Frutos Dieguez |
| PowerShell script | Automate posting messages via RESTful API | Dan |
| ServiceNow plugin for Mattermost | Receive and send updates via ServiceNow | Pradeep Murugesan |
| Steam plugin for Mattermost | Compare games and get game stats | Gabe Jackson |
| WebRTC plugin for Mattermost | Start audio and video calls from Mattermost | Nikhil Ranjan |
Productivity Tools
Romain Maneschi created Matternelle, which enables your team to launch a fully featured live chat powered by Mattermost on any webpage!
Conversations that take place on the live chat are automatically sent to Mattermost where an agent can respond immediately to customer inquiries.
Another useful tool built during the hackathon was a to-do list in Mattermost.
Joram Wilander created another useful productivity tool: a To-Do plugin that allows you to add items to a to-do list from messages posted in Mattermost and keeps them in one place across all your teams and channels.
To help you stay on top of your work, the plugin even sends you a daily reminder of your outstanding tasks.
Other productivity tools that were created include:
| Name | Description | Contributor |
| Agenda plugin for Mattermost | Build your agenda for meetings quickly | Maria Nunez |
| Air Quality Index (AQI) plugin for Mattermost | Monitor air quality in different locations | Harshil Sharma |
| File encryption plugin | Provide symmetric encryption and decryption layers when uploading and downloading files | Hilal Özdemir Pehlivan |
| Screen recording plugin | Capture your screen and send the recording in Mattermost | Claudio Costa |
| StopWords script | Find occurrences of non-inclusive language in the Mattermost documentation | Anindita Basu |
Platform – Web and Desktop Apps
For the platform itself, Dean Whillier, Andrew Brown, and Eric Sethna teamed up to create a prototype of a new advanced text editor. This is handy for those not familiar with Markdown and want to quickly format their message with bold, italics, code blocks, or more.
Have feedback about the editor? Let us know in the public Advanced Text Editor channel.
Another great project gives users the ability to set custom statuses. By simply clicking on the status icon next to your profile picture, you can set custom text as your status along with an expiry time. Potential use cases for this feature include quickly indicating you’re sick, in meetings, or traveling to your team members.
Awesome work on this, Md Zubair Ahmed!
Other platform projects for web and desktop apps included:
Platform – Mobile Apps
One of the major mobile app highlights is voice message support on mobile.
With a push of a button, you can quickly record a voice message on your phone and post it right in a Mattermost channel for others to listen and reply to.
Stunning work by both Elias Nahum and Miguel Alatzar!
Other platform projects for mobile apps included:
| Description | Contributor |
| Combine teams and channels in the mobile drawer | Sudheer Timmaraju |
| Quick access to attachments in Camera Roll app on mobile | Claude Wild |
Platform – Backend
There were also several hackathon projects focused on backend improvements for the Mattermost platform, including post query optimization, the start of an upgraded set of Mattermost plugin APIs, and full text search replacement with Bleeve.
Here’s the full list of backend platform projects:
| Name | Description | Contributor(s) |
| Canary plugins | Allow more than one version of a plugin to run in a high-availability cluster | Shota Gvinepadze |
| Go Vet extension for Mattermost | Run code quality checks, such as the inclusion of license statement at the top of a file and the usage of structured logging | Jesús Espino |
| Optimizations for post table and query times | Accelerate post and query times | Patryk Pomykalski |
| Plugin events supporting plugin-to-plugin communication | Handle plugin to plugin communication in an easier way | enolal826 |
| Rework of Mattermost plugin API | Improving the Mattermost plugin API | Jesse Hallam, Ben Schumacher, Shota Gvinepadze, and İlker Göktuğ Öztürk |
| Search engine architecture with Bleeve | Generalizing the search backend behind a search engine interface and moving search into a database layer | Miguel de la Cruz and Jesús Espino |
Fun Apps
And finally, it wouldn’t be a hackathon without fun and crazy ideas!
Here are some of our favorites in this category, including a trivia plugin and a two-player game right in Mattermost!
| Name | Description | Contributor |
| Creepy cat plugin for Mattermost | Get followed by a creepy cat as you move your cursor around Mattermost | Eli Yukelzon |
| Rock-paper-scissors trivia plugin | Enjoy a modern take on a classic game | Ali Farooq |
| Trivia plugin | Answer questions randomly picked by jService.io | Shota Gvinepadze |
| Word by Word plugin for Mattermost | Display messages in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) format | Allen Lai |
Are you interested in contributing to the Mattermost open source project?
You can also stop by our contributors’ community channel to say hello and head over to GitHub and browse our open help wanted tickets.
Thanks again to everyone who contributed to the Mattermost Hackathon. We’ll see you next time!
