Breaking Boundaries at the BT Hackathon 2025
- LaRaie Zimm
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
This year, we brought back one of our favorite Breakthrough traditions, the BT Hackathon, and it was a hit! Teams across the company took a break from their day-to-day work (well, in addition to it!) to experiment, innovate, and have fun with technology. The result was a mix of creative ideas, working demos, and a whole lot of teamwork.
Team HackOps 5: “We’re Not Kitten Around!”
Team HackOps 5 came in strong with a theme that was equal parts clever and cause-driven, and true to their name, they weren’t kitten around! Their project, “Voice Navigation for a More Accessible Web,”explored how voice control can open new ways for users to interact with websites.
Using speech recognition tools, they built a demo that let users navigate a site entirely by voice commands. This is an incredible step toward improving accessibility for people with limited mobility or vision challenges. The presentation, shared through a sleek Gamma deck, showed how intuitive, responsive, and downright cool this feature can be. This is a fun, functional prototype that proves accessibility and innovation can go hand in hand. Their work showed how small experiments can lead to big accessibility wins. In the words of our Senior RFP Coordinator, Caysie Turner, who helped create this Voice Navigation Tool,
“This hackathon was a great reminder that when you put diverse minds together with a clear purpose, meaningful innovation happens fast. Our goal was simple: make the web easier to use for people who rely on something other than a keyboard or mouse. Voice navigation opens the door for users with motor challenges, and building this prototype showed us just how much impact small innovations can have on real accessibility."
Team Unleashed: Feature Flags, Unleashed!
Team Unleashed lived up to their name, diving headfirst into the world of advanced feature flagging to see just how much flexibility they could bring to software delivery. Using Unleash, an open-source framework, and connecting it to GitLab, they built a system that lets teams flip features on or off in real time (no redeploys required)! Talk about power at your fingertips!
Key takeaways:
Streamlines software delivery
Enables parallel development and independent testing
Makes hotfixes lightning-fast
Works with multiple SDKs (.NET, Java, React, iOS)
The experiment, a Java Dropwizard login app powered by a feature flag, proved that the concept works beautifully. They even put IntelliJ’s new AI assistant to the test (results were…mixed, but entertaining). In true Hackathon spirit, they learned a ton, broke a few things, fixed them again, and pushed the boundaries of what’s possible.
Team Wheel of Names: Spin It to Win It!
When it comes to creative coding, Team Wheel of Names really spun up something special. Their mission: upgrade the Wheel of Names Prize + Carols app to make it smarter, smoother, and ready for some serious spinning.
They tackled everything from limiting entries to locking slices and dreamed up automatic toggles to keep the fun rolling. Along the way, they battled an outdated repo and a crash course in Vue, but no challenge was too dizzying for this team.
By the end, they had a working prototype, big plans for UI upgrades, and a newfound appreciation for the power of persistence (and maybe a little luck of the spin).
Stay tuned, this wheel is just getting started!
Team Ice Station Zebra: Drupal + AI Experiments
Our final team ventured into AI for Drupal, exploring how artificial intelligence can enhance content creation and management. Their experiments included:
Automatic image alt tags for improved accessibility
Content tagging to help organize and categorize data
Data summarization for faster insights
They shared working demos showing how AI can be woven into Drupal workflows, sparking lots of discussion about future possibilities for client projects. In the words of the Hackathon contestant himself, Principal Software Engineer Jack Franks:
“The machines aren't our overlords yet, so at the moment, we are asking them for favors! To help the sight impaired, we joined forces with the AI to automatically generate image tags from images. (It even recognized Starfleet uniforms!) To help us with categorizing old content, we trained our AI friend on our taxonomies and content rules. Then, we could give it content in bulk for it to tag. Finally, we gave our AI companion a set of rules on what makes good, correct content that we want to present on our site, and in a variety of characters and writing styles, it generated summary content and suggested edits for improving our writing. We gave working demos that showed how all of these cool AI features can be integrated into Drupal workflows. Lots of smart and fun discussions came out of the showcase, which is exactly what these hackathons are for!”
Wrapping Up
The Hackathon reminded us why we love what we do: solving problems creatively, learning from each other, and building tools that make technology more inclusive, efficient, and fun. A huge thanks to everyone who participated, supported, and cheered on the teams. We can’t wait to see where these ideas go next!