♪ (upbeat music) ♪
To me, it's 24 hours of unlimited opportunity.
It's all about the creativity.
It's all about being daring and a bit nuts
and do it collectively.
There's nothing like a team of people doing something crazy.
It's very energizing. You can really feel the energy.
Everyone's always brimming with ideas.
Too many ideas to even do in one ShipIt all,
like the next ten ShipIts.
For me, personally,
it's a bit of my competitive streak.
It's nice to get that out of your system once every three months.
(Nabeelah) I'm now a pro with the button press machine.
I think I'm OK to run a political campaign now.
(Robin) I think that's the kind of exciting direction
that ShipIt's starting to take,
but we've had all sorts of really interesting,
what we call non-technical projects recently.
The idea that we started with
is not the idea we ended up with,
so the initial idea was mine,
but then it went through a lot of shaping and molding
to get to what it is now.
Then it has a fancy Post-It dispenser.
(laughter)
Yeah, that's amusing every time we do it.
Pivoting is a definite, integral part of ShipIt.
Teams do change direction based on obstacles that they run into,
what they discover is achievable within the time period.
♪ (video game music) ♪
So now it's probably a good time to give you a how-to guide for ShipIt.
ShipIt's incredibly simple.
It starts with ideas and individuals.
Those individuals then seek out other people to form teams
and brainstorm further.
Then the 24 hour countdown clock starts,
and they start creating some awesome ideas
and awesome solutions.
There's one simple ask at the end of their 24 hours:
three minute lightning talk to their peers
for the ultimate prize: bragging rights.
ShipIt started as a hack-a-thon.
Some of our engineers, and we had a very small number,
we could all fit around a table.
We went to each person's computers to watch the demos.
These days, thousands of people
in all our offices around the world participate.
The Grand finals are so live now that they get live-streamed into different rooms
because we can't all fit into one room.
(bell ringing)
Anyone for the chocolate?
(overlapping speech)
Salt and sugar, primarily.
(woman) (laughs) Awesome!
I think the most important part of ShipIt for me
is we don't take ourselves too seriously.
That's the way I think collaboration and innovation should be.
It's more complex than we initially thought.
I learned to not be too ambitious
on all the things that you think you can build in 24 hours.
Dont look at this [inaudible]
That means bad things have happened!
A lot of us got into programming because we fell in love
with that roller-coaster ride of highs and lows
when your code goes from being almost ready
to being completely broken in a matter of seconds,
and I guess ShipIt lets us relive a little bit of that.
We've broken something, yeah, yeah, at the last minute.
And it should kind of vanish after 30 seconds,
and it should have been a lot nicer.
Yeah, now it's much nicer! It has the shadows.
(laughing)
We're ready to sleep now.
♪ (soft fingerpicking guitar) ♪
We know it's a world first
because it was so freaking difficult
nobody else will attempt it.
It's really fun when you get up there and you present,
and people really appreciate and you go "Aw, that was really cool,"
a sense of recognition,
and then when you see other people who are like "amazing stuff is happening."
You just feel like you work for the most incredible place in the world.
(Mike) I think we had about 300 entries for ShipIt 30
so it's a very large number of teams.
(Colin) When you look back over the past ten years,
the number of things that started as a ShipIt project
and kind of blossomed into a full blown project,
there's countless examples of that.
ShipIt exists in perpetuity.
What we find is that the end of one ShipIt in our presentations
is the start of the next one as people start creating and conversing their ideas
and creating their teams and thinking
about what they want to do next quarter.
He wouldn't cut it if he knew how much it costs.
(laughter)
I mean, winning in ShipIt is everybody wins.
(announcer) The winner of ShipIt 30th annual anniversary is...
(crowd cheering)