One of the the most exciting parts of working on the engineering team at Zillow is the opportunity to participate in Hack Week. Twice a year we are encouraged to try something new or innovate on projects that can improve the customer or employee experience. We set aside our daily responsibilities to put all our energy into a passion project.
This past Hack Week I led a team working on ‘Homes Across Black History.’ We wanted to celebrate Black History Month by highlighting the legacy of more than a dozen leaders throughout black history. Our idea was to build an interactive map similar to Zillow’s, allowing employees to zoom in on states and click on cities to learn about important figures and the homes they lived in.
We believed seeing a leader’s home would humanize these historical figures, and make them seem more relatable. We wanted Zillow employees to understand despite their incredible achievements, these were real people with jobs, and kids just like you and me.
After the pitch, other employees volunteered to help with everything from researching where the homes are located to writing the code to build the product. The group included several members of Billow, the Black/African Ancestry Affinity Network that empowers black employees at Zillow Group through internal advocacy, networking and mentoring, along with relationship building within the broader black tech community.
We built the Homes Across Black History application using React and Next.js. React allowed us to organize the app into components. For example, the map was one component, the list card view was another, and the modal that displayed home information was a third component. We supplied these components with the data for each historical figure’s home. Finally, we combined the components into a single page and rendered that page using Next.js.
The app is now available to employees on the company network and our project went on to win the Social Impact Hack Week Award! Winners get a trophy and a cash prize, along with a badge to display on Zall Wall, our in-house social network. I am incredibly proud of all we accomplished in just ONE WEEK and grateful to work at such an innovative, and inclusive company!
