It was late 2020. Video calls froze, ideas flew, and one engineer presented from what looked suspiciously like a laundry room. This was Rover’s inaugural Maker Days: unpolished, chaotic, and absolutely electric.
Rover’s internal hackathon, called “Maker Days,” started at this most unlikely time. That first Maker Days event reminded us of Rover’s roots and helped to pull us out of the pandemic funk. Since that time, it has become a lasting part of Rover’s engineering culture.
Now, with 11 Maker Days under our belts and over 100 projects across them, we’re reflecting on the program, its goals, how it has evolved, and its lasting impact on Rover.
Rover’s Origin Story
At a “Startup Weekend” event in Seattle in June of 2011, Greg Gottesman pitched an idea for a pet care marketplace to make it easier for families like his to go on vacation without worrying about their beloved dogs. It was at that event that co-founder and current VP of Engineering Phil Kimmey was enlisted for a 54-hour hackathon where the first version of Rover was created. Looking in Rover’s monorepo, you can still see the commits from that weekend at the beginning of the git log!
After a weekend of hacking, the team had an initial version of the product (think Web 2.0 aesthetics—rounded buttons and all 😂). The project team, including Phil and Greg, presented to the judges’ panel and won first prize. But that, as you might have guessed, was only the beginning. The project made waves in the Seattle tech community, and before long, the team had raised real money to turn this idea into a business.
In 2020, that founding story felt like a distant memory. We were a globally scaled business, laser-focused on fine-tuning features, yet needing a creative spark—or, honestly, just an excuse to break out of our sweatpants. It was the spirit of our origin story that inspired us to create an internal innovation contest that encouraged us to work collaboratively and dream big for new approaches to serving our pet-loving community.
The First Maker Days
Our goal was to create an event that encouraged collaboration, sparked innovative ideas that might not otherwise be invested in, and, hopefully, see some of those ideas come to life in Rover’s platform and product. To that end, in late 2020, we put out the call: if you had a week to try to prove an idea to improve Rover’s business, what would it be?
Our team did not disappoint. Nearly 30 ideas were pitched, and they were all over the map: everything from improvements to how we worked, to cost savings, to novel applications of new technology, and exciting ideas on how to better serve Rover’s customers. The ideas were pitched, teams were formed, and the hacking began.
It was an unstructured and chaotic burst of creativity as teams figured out how to quickly gel, refine their idea, and bring it to life. By the end of the week, it was clear that something special was happening. We all gathered remotely to watch as engineers from across the company showed off incredible ideas that had been developed in such a short amount of time.
Several projects demonstrated features to improve the pet owner or sitter experience, like a calculator to help sitters calculate a good price or a feature to help re-home dogs in need.
Another exciting batch of projects looked at how we could leverage new technologies in Rover’s business. One team created a dog image recognition pipeline using Kafka Streams and TensorFlow. The RoverTama team had fun with it and created an Apple Watch app for virtual pet care.
Some of the most lasting impacts from these first Maker Days, and many since, have been developing new tools for improving the way we work. From this very first event, we got five new tools that continue to be used at Rover to this day, including a Slack bot that helps us perform rollbacks and other operational tasks, a tool for viewing and developing notifications, and interactive documentation for Rover’s design system.
After watching all of the presentations, you could feel the energy and excitement even in a virtual room. That afternoon, it felt like we were together. Finally, a winner was crowned, and they were mailed their reward: the first-ever Maker Days mug. Since this event, we have made uniquely designed mugs for every Maker Days, and they have become perhaps the most coveted piece of Rover swag.
In a survey sent out after the event, everyone shared their excitement about the first Maker Days.
It was amazing to see these creative ideas come to life in a few short days!
These all seem like amazing and impactful changes to the Rover organization!
I thought it went really really well, especially given that we were all remote. I was super impressed with my team and it was really great to get to work with some new people! One of my favorite things I have done so far at Rover!
How Maker Days Evolved
Since that first event, we’ve learned a lot and have continued to evolve the program over the years. The planning group has grown from a couple of people to a full team that gathers a few times a year to pull together an amazing event. In the last couple of years, there has been a new dimension: in-person collaboration.
Themes
We noticed even at the first Maker Days that projects usually fell into a few different categories. Over time, we decided to try theming the events to create a focus in different areas. Just as the nature of Rover’s business challenges evolved, so did our focus on Maker Days.
Now, each year, we have 3-4 events, each with a different theme. The first is the “Marquee Maker Days,” which harkens back to that first event: an open-ended, traditional hackathon that is primarily about building for Rover’s owners and sitters. Then we have a “Scratch Your Own Itch” Maker Days focused on creating tools or platform improvements that make our jobs easier. Finally, we have 1-2 “Fix It Sprints” a year where we look to clean up bugs, apply UX polish, or otherwise improve the product through small changes that we might not have time for during the rest of the year.
We’ve also, on occasion, had special themes to highlight important business challenges or interesting industry trends. In 2023, we had an “AI” themed Maker Days to help us better understand how we might leverage some of the burgeoning LLM tools. Earlier this year, we had an event centered around UX Excellence and fixing common customer pain points.
Project Continuation & “Shark Tanks”
One challenge we identified after the first year or two of Maker Days was that many promising projects struggled to make it past the event’s conclusion. It’s a hackathon, and we were under no illusion that every project should live on. Still, we felt it was important that the most promising projects get a real look and shot at prioritization with a development team.
To this end, we developed a process where Maker Days teams could formally document their project and, after the event ended, have it considered in a “Shark Tank” of business leaders that would aid in routing it to the appropriate team and, on occasion, into a roadmap.
This process has led to over 20 projects living on from Maker Days events in our production product or development toolchain, having significant impacts on the business.
The Lasting Impacts
Looking back at the last 4 years, with 11 events and over 100 projects, I think it is fair to say Maker Days has accomplished the goals of collaboration and innovation that we initially set out. It has become a core part of how we operate for many reasons.
First: the projects. Maker Days “Scratch Your Own Itch” projects over the years have transformed the way we work as an engineering team. One step change was when a Maker Days team built a proof of concept of a Remote Development Environment. This project eventually led us to move all development to Github Codespaces and enable new engineers to get a development environment up and running in 10 minutes instead of 5 hours.
The “Fix It Sprint” has resulted cumulatively in 100s of bugs being fixed and millions of lines of code deleted and cleaned up (this is not an exaggeration; there were nearly 3 million lines deleted in just the last one!). These periodic clean-up efforts keep us focused and efficient the rest of the year and give us space to add a little polish to the user experience.
The “Marquee Maker Days” has led to some of the most cherished features of the Rover application. In 2021, a Roverine went through the most challenging part of pet parenthood: a pet’s passing. He was dreading having to deactivate his dog’s account on the platform and didn’t want to lose all of the photos and memories that were captured there. That’s when he pitched a project to allow pet parents to memorialize their pets rather than delete them. The team built and launched this feature, which has been used to create memorials for thousands of beloved pets.
Maker Days started as a way to reconnect and spark creativity in a difficult time. Today, it’s a tradition that reminds us why we love building at Rover and has shaped our engineering culture–accentuating and codifying who we are. We are a collaborative team that is always looking for ways to help each other do our best work. We are an innovative team that has a deep connection to the community we serve. And, of course, we like to have fun building things!
I love working on something entirely new and with other Rover employees that I learn a lot from!
If you’re interested in working with us at Rover to further our mission to make it easier for people to have pet love in their lives (and see a Maker Days event for yourself!), check out our Engineering Careers page at https://www.rover.com/careers/engineering/.