Luminous Goes to the Philippines! (The Hackathon edition)

Most people know Luminous for the software. What they don’t see is the team behind it—distributed, deeply skilled, and in many cases, people we've worked with daily for years... without ever meeting in person.

That changed this month.

Jared Ward (CEO) and Brendon Beebe (CTO) flew out to Cagayan de Oro to spend a week with our Philippines team—some of whom they've worked with for over five years, strictly over Zoom and Slack. What started as a hackathon turned into something way more valuable: a human connection we didn’t know we were missing.

“We’ve talked almost every day for five years. I’d never seen them.”

It’s hard to overstate what it meant to meet our engineers, product managers, and team leads in person. When you’re scaling a company, it’s easy to get locked into tasks, timelines, and tech. But behind every sprint is a person.

Whether it was debating how tall Sir J Ron might be (spoiler: taller than expected), sharing seafood dinners, or just learning how to pronounce each other's names correctly—this trip turned names on screens into real relationships.

“There’s a language barrier. There’s also a human barrier. This trip broke both.” — Jared Ward, CEO

The Hackathon: Building Real Tools, Fast

For the hackathon, we split into cross-functional teams and gave everyone a simple challenge:

Build something that works. Build something useful. You’ve got three days.

The ideas were strong. The energy was real. Everyone pushed beyond their day-to-day roles to think creatively about the workflows our users struggle with the most.

One team built a tool that streamlines sales order line items to support faster inventory decisions—a real-world problem with a scrappy solution. Another built custom widgets with flexible views and actions. The winning hack? A fully functional prototype with direct user impact.

“They had three days. What they built was impressive, usable, and deeply thoughtful.” — Brendon Beebe, CTO

This Isn’t a One-Off

This was our first in-person hackathon—and it won’t be our last.

Everyone agreed: the energy, the collaboration, the insight—we need more of it. Whether that means a return trip every year, or ideally every quarter, the value is undeniable.

“If we hit our goals, then f*ck yeah, we’re coming back. In style.” — Jared Ward

This trip wasn’t a vacation (despite the palm trees and hopeful beach plans). It was about alignment. About seeing the humans behind the commits. And about recognizing that even as we build with efficiency and speed, we're building with people.

More Than Just Code

This hackathon reminded us what culture really is. It’s not ping-pong tables or Slack emojis. It’s people pushing each other to solve hard problems. It’s laughing over dinner after a long day of building. It’s turning “remote” into “connected.”

Big thanks to the entire Philippines team and everyone who made this possible.

We’re coming back.

In style.

Ready to See What We're Building?

Whether it's real-time inventory decisions, seamless inbound shipment reconciliation, or powerful custom workflows—everything we build starts with solving real problems for real teams.

Want to see Luminous in action? Book a demo today. Let’s talk about what’s slowing you down—and how we can fix it.