Troy Archer

Organizing and Engineering a Corporate Hackathon Corporate hackathons drive rapid innovation, foster technical cross-pollination, and surface valuable product concepts. As a member of the Bandwidth Hackathon planning committee, I helped coordinate our second annual organization-wide hackathon. Planning Committee Operations Organizing an engineering hackathon requires structured planning over several months. Our committee focused on six primary operational tracks: Event Scheduling & Logistics: Establishing timelines, communication channels, and venue requirements. Theme Selection: Aligning hackathon goals with artificial intelligence and telecommunications platform enhancements. Idea Crowdsourcing: Creating centralized project pools for engineers to discover collaborators. Judging Frameworks: Establishing clear evaluation rubrics covering technical complexity, business value, and execution quality. Feedback Integration: Applying operational retrospective findings from our inaugural event. Organizational Alignment: Maintaining transparent progress reporting across engineering leadership. Engineering Perspective Participating on both the organizational committee and an active hackathon team gives unique insight into hackathon success factors: ...

Building a Portfolio & Dev Blog Software engineers benefit from personal portfolios and blogs to showcase their technical decisions, project architecture, and domain knowledge. A resume provides a brief overview of past roles. A dedicated technical website allows engineers to document system designs, share technical lessons, and demonstrate engineering standards. Technical Requirements When planning a personal website, the goal is to balance low maintenance overhead with fast page load performance. ...

Hackathon 2025: Handbrake Message Verification During Bandwidth Hackathon 2025, our team of five engineers built Handbrake in 48 hours. Handbrake is an automated system that validates telecommunications message traffic against registered Toll-Free verification campaign profiles to identify campaign drift. Our project placed 2nd out of 29 team submissions. Understanding Campaign Drift Campaign drift occurs when a business sends messaging content that deviates from its registered Toll-Free verification use case profile. ...