Unbounce’s Fall ShipIt Day

ShipIt Day is when the staff at Unbounce are invited to put aside their regular, daily responsibilities and work on anything that interests them. These projects don’t need to be related to their area of work, or even be Unbounce related at all. ShipIt Day has only one rule – you must be able to demo what you worked on at the end of the day. To this end, we encourage participants to either constrain the size of their projects, or team up with others to put more momentum behind their ideas.

Anyone interested in pitching an idea meets at 4:00pm the day before ShipIt Day to try and get people behind their project. After all the ideas have been presented, teams are formed and team members prepare for the next morning, when they will get started. The teams then have until 4:00pm on ShipIt Day, when they must demo what they’ve done.

The idea around ShipIt Day comes from Atlassian, and the term “shipping” refers to pushing code out into production for your customers to use. Even though the name may come across as being developer focused, the day is intended for Unbouncers of all skill-sets to come together and work on whatever they would like – tech-related or not.

Notable projects from previous ShipIt Days include:

• Custom 404 pages for your domain in Unbounce,
• The CTA Conference Mobile App, and
• Coffee Timer Life Hack.

This was Unbounce’s third ShipIt Day, and the team knocked it out of the park! This time around 37 project ideas were put forward, and over 25 Unbouncers participated to complete 20 different projects by the end of the day. The completed projects include:

Office Posters

Customer Success coaches Gary and Mitchelle sifted through the never ending list of ridiculous quotes that Unbouncers say and turned them into posters to decorate our new office with. Not only do they look good, but they also remind us of our funny and embarrassing moments at Unbounce.

Clojure CORS Library

Developers David and Roman worked on an all-new library to support CORS in the Clojure Ring framework. This project will prove to be more and more valuable as we split the monolith.

The project is called encors, and is available on Clojars and open sourced on GitHub

UI Redesign

Vivi, our UX Team Lead, spent the day on a wholesale revamp of our web application’s look and feel. She worked to unify all UI components, reduce clutter, and overall improve the aesthetic. This redesign is coming soon to a web application near you!

Ping Pong Leader Board

There is one thing that Unbouncers value above all – their ping pong chops. Now, thanks to developers Arthur and Matt, we can do that in style. The new Unpong board can be used to keep score during a match and has a complex algorithm to determine a player’s standing in a tournament style ladder.

Mobile Responsive

A few weeks ago, we rolled out the ability to build mobile responsive landing pages in Unbounce. To compliment our newest feature addition, our very own Customer Success Coach Mark worked on the ability to preview your landing pages in both desktop and mobile formats. Slan, our Page Builder team lead, worked on a prototype to automatically convert your regular landing pages to work well on mobile screen sizes.

ShipIt Day’s aim is to foster innovation, increase team collaboration, and have a good time – and the team did just that. The diversity of the projects that were completed was vast, and the quality impressive. ShipIt Days are a tradition that will likely stick around and continue to affect the work we do at Unbounce.

Until next time, ShipIt!

– James Brennan
Developer