Our week-long getaway to the sunny beaches of Costa do Sauipe in Bahia included one of our most extraordinary hackathons to date. The outcome was a stellar lineup of projects that are already making a significant impact for our cherished client base.

Let's just say our brainstorming sessions were fueled by creativity and maybe just a hint of lime-infused courage 🤪

Here's a glimpse of these remarkable creations:

During our first weekend we explored the region’s famous waterfalls, made all the more breathtaking thanks to some recent rainfall and surging water levels.

In this retreat we had exclusive rooms for many different teams and we were able to have a really intensive and very rewarding week of work.

Perhaps this natural beauty inspired the new Universal Launcher plugins we later developed at our hackathon.  If you don't know what Universal Launcher is – it's like the Swiss Army knife of productivity tools; one line, ten actions, and suddenly you're the superhero of efficiency.

This was the retreat that everyone at AE fell in love with Universal Launcher (without exaggeration it actually 10-20x’es my productivity). So much so that we’ve now had to ban Universal Launcher plugins for future hackathons to make everyone make more new cool stuff. (You can make a UL plugin iff you also make another hackathon project)

Laying by the pool, a desert landscape stretching into the horizon, we worked tirelessly at our laptops driven by a thirst for groundbreaking ideas and, of course, margaritas.

We hooked up our own hidden speakers in the bathroom playing till the resort made us take them down, and then bribed a guard $20 to let us put them back up.Coding in Margaritaville

We gathered with our Brazilian team in Santo Amaro de Imperatriz, an area renowned for its rich thermos-mineral waters.

We came up with some particularly cool Blockchain related projects. 

Most excitingly, this was the retreat we got serious about building fully functioning awesome finished products, and expecting that from everyone. It worked! The total output of this retreat exceeded the output of all previous retreats combined.

Our first big retreat! We'd grown a lot since our last retreat, now with hundreds of people meeting in person at an amazing beach in Brazil.

Check out our Youtube Video!

This was our first time meeting so many people, it was super exciting to see all the amazing ideas that came out of this retreat.

Working from one of the most drop-dead gorgeous places on Earth is like having an office with a postcard view and no Zoom calls.

This wasn't your average beachy workcation—it was the birthplace  of our first startup, ElectricSMS, which was sold for millions of dollars. The week revealed our talent for creating million dollar companies, not to mention karaoke.we ended up selling

This retreat was epic! We had the whole team together and we had so much fun meeting everyone in person. It was the first time that the US team met the BR team.

We were able to enjoy the most beautiful beach in the whole world and do amazing work while relaxing and enjoying at the same time.

By the end of the week we had a Hackathon where a few legendary projects were born. And the winner of the hackathon this year (a spouse) later joined AE as a full-time employee!