#HACKATHON

We successfully managed to build a web application of our ProcessMining extension, which has its own data engine, web interface and an option to embed Tableau dashboard and perform filter actions! 

Hackathons have always been a part of our Apps for Tableau culture. Everything started when our CTO and Tableau Zen Master Merlijn and Co-founder Tjalling Tolle decided to do a Hackathon and built the first extensions like ShowMeMore, PictureThis and even Mario in Tableau! During our Hackathons all the developers come together in a collaborative, fun environment and work on something fascinating. The ideas and prototypes produced as a result of Hackathons never fail to impress and our latest hackathon was no exception!

All our hackathons have very deep technical roots, where we focus on one challenge which we all find interesting. How do we do that? During our normal office hours, every developer at Apps for Tableau encounters various challenges which they tackle in innovative ways. However, sometimes we meet ideas which are worth spending more time on together to serve a larger goal. For our hackathons, we pick the most interesting ideas which align with the core values and motto of Apps for Tableau and work on it together.  

We started the day with fresh brew coffee and collaborative brainstorming session where we discussed the core idea of the Hackathon and our expectations for the end of the day. Our goals this Hackathon was unlike previous hackathons and that’s what made this hackathon even more amazing and different This time‘, instead of a new extension idea, we decided to build our first standalone product (no Tableau involved).  

 ProcessMining is one of our best-selling Extensions, which has a lot on offer to manage complex business process and process lifecycle management. Undoubtedly, our idea was to develop a standalone ProcessMining application, with its own powerful fast data engine. Despite the fact our ProcessMining Extension performs well in the Tableau environment, we wanted to make the extension even more amazing. So, we decided to give it an interface (web application), data engine and more! 

After the brainstorming session, we decided to split-up into teams and work on different components which collectively became the final output.  

After a few more coffees and a competitive basketball game before the lunch break, we already had the web interface for the new product ready and we managed to extract the ProcessMining Viz and logic from our ProcessMining Extension. So, we used a modified web interface from WriteBackExtreme, which is very sophisticated and extremely flexible with permissions and groups which are already built in. The interface from WriteBackExtreme already proved to be efficient and quick and we needed a quick data engine to get data into the new ProcessMining product. Obviously, our choice was to re-use the WriteBackExtreme data engine.

So, what did we get at the end? Once each team had built their own component, we combined all of them and got our final product. What we got at the end of the day was a new standalone ProcessMining product! We successfully managed to build a web application of our ProcessMining extension, which has its own data engine, web interface and an option to embed Tableau dashboard and perform filter actions.