At REWE digital we have a complex tech stack for our website: dozens of teams work on hundreds of microservices that are included in various page templates, features and systems. In order to optimize the web performance ā the experience of page loading and interaction ā of a single page, you often have to work on several things at once with several teams. Also, not everyone knew about why performance matters, how to measure it or how to optimize it.
In 2021, we held an online hackathon to develop our product further by focussing on web performance. We called it Days of Performance (DOPE).
The goal of DOPE was not to create a single feature, but rather to seed performance culture within our organization. This is how it worked, what we learned from the process and how you can organize your own performance hackathon.