Would You Install It on Monday? 

Inside the competition that brought Walmart Global Tech associates across countries and teams together to experiment, build and turn big ideas into working solutions.

What did I actually get done last week?

It can be a surprisingly difficult question. 

For one Walmart Global Tech team, answering it meant opening Jira. Slack. GitHub. Their calendar. Piecing together meetings, code reviews and tasks just to prepare for a morning stand-up. 

So they decided to build something better. 

They were part of more than 7,000 builders that spent four days targeting problems they believed were worth solving. 

Some tackled database queries that make computer resources more efficent. Others explored safer software testing. And, there was the team that focused on helping associates remember everything they'd accomplished in a busy week. 

Together, they were participating in Everybody Hacks. While Hackathons aren’t new to Walmart, Everybody Hacks was the first to bring Walmart Global Tech teams across countries, markets and organizations together for one global competition. 

AI-assisted development wasn’t new to these builders, either. Many already use AI tools as part of their day-to-day engineering work. What was different was the scale and the challenge: builders from across the company experimenting at the same time, moving quickly from an idea to a working solution and seeing what they could accomplish in just a few days.

If you've never experienced a hackathon, imagine thousands of technologists taking an idea and seeing how far they can push it. It starts with a problem worth solving or an opportunity worth exploring. Then comes the sprint: designing, building, testing and, finally, presenting a working solution.

It's equal parts innovation sprint, engineering challenge and friendly competition. 

There were late nights, demo rehearsals, leaderboard watching and, naturally, plenty of bragging rights. 

By week's end, associates had pitched 3,071 ideas, submitted 2,336 working hacks and narrowed the field to 20 finalists. 

But perhaps the most interesting part wasn't how many ideas were built. 

It was how they were judged. 

Build Something Worth Monday 

While technical excellence, business impact and creativity all factored into the judging, one test rose above the rest: 

Would you install it on Monday?

Not: "Is this the most technically impressive project?" Instead: "Would someone actually use it?"

That question shaped projects that looked remarkably different from one another. What they shared was a relentless focus on solving real problems.

Start with a Problem You Know

For Angelo Luna-Fatali, Madelyn McGrath and Anudit Verma, the team behind Rewind, the problem was almost universal. 

Every morning started the same way: Trying to remember yesterday. 

Across dozens of meetings, Slack and Teams messages, documents, tasks and decisions, it can be hard to reconstruct what you worked on, remember what changed and prioritize what needs attention next. 

The project began as an AI-powered stand-up generator. But every time Angelo, Anudit, or Madelyn thought they were finished, someone on the team brought up another question the tool might help solve. 

Could it prepare someone for a one-on-one? Help with performance reviews? Surface potential roadblocks? Could it help associates outside of engineering? 

"We didn't want to build something just for engineers. We wanted to build something people across Walmart would actually use," said Madelyn. 

That thinking transformed Rewind into an AI work-memory tool that helps associates recover the context of their recent work without manually piecing it together, then organize it into useful updates, meeting preparation and performance summaries. 

In other words, it helps associates remember the work they’ve done and communicate it with confidence. 

Rewind ultimately earned second place, but perhaps more importantly, it embodied the question at the center of Everybody Hacks: Would people use it? 

The answer, at least from the audience during the finalist presentations, appeared to be yes.

Then Think Bigger

The team behind Mutation Guard started somewhere different. Like many Everybody Hacks teams, Revanth Chappidi, Arun Sasikumar, Sobha Parag Taneja and Neharika Khera didn't fall in love with their first idea.

"We white boarded dozens of ideas. We weren't looking for the easiest problem to solve," said Arun. "We wanted to solve one that would become even more important over time."

That thinking led them to AI-assisted software development. As developers generate more code with AI, the team saw a growing need to ensure that code behaves as intended.

Rather than building another coding assistant, they built a safety net.

Mutation Guard automatically validates AI-generated code, helping engineers catch functional issues before changes reach production.

Arun focused on LLM integration. Neharika led product testing. Parag developed coverage metrics and meaningful success measures. Revanth concentrated on implementation. "Every day, we'd come back together, compare what we'd learned and figure out what to improve next," said Revanth.

They tested their tool against their own active projects, uncovering bugs, improving pull requests and proving the concept against real code, not just hypothetical examples.

The project had challenges. Early versions took nearly 40 minutes to run, and the team intentionally limited the first release to Java applications while considering how to scale it further.

None of that diminished their confidence. They believed they were building for a future where AI-assisted software development would become the norm.

The judges agreed.

Mutation Guard earned Everybody Hacks' top prize.

Even after the competition ended, their work has continued.

The team is exploring how to scale the project beyond Java and broaden adoption across Walmart.

Finding Signals in the Data

Like the Mutation Guard team, Jie Shi and Wei Wang set out to solve a problem that most customers and associates would never see directly: inefficient database queries.

A poorly written query can scan billions of rows of data when only a tiny fraction is needed. In large, complex systems, those inefficiencies consume time and computing resources. It was a problem, according to Jie, "that happens every day but is difficult to spot at scale." 

Their solution, QueryLens helps engineers identify those queries before those costs accumulate.

Working on QueryLens also brought together two longtime friends and collaborators.

Jie and Wei first met in 2015 while working under the same advisor at the University of California, Riverside. Years later – and after their careers had taken them to different Walmart and Sam's Club teams – the moment they realized Everybody Hacks let associates form their own teams, they knew exactly who they wanted to call.

Their project earned third place and served as a reminder that some of the most valuable innovations are the ones that quietly make the technology behind Walmart work better.

More Than a Competition

When the finalists reflected on Everybody Hacks, they didn’t start by talking about winning.

The Rewind team described carrying a rapid-iteration mindset back into their everyday work. Jie and Wei said Everybody Hacks strengthened their technical skills and their ability to prioritize work and tell the story behind what they built. The Mutation Guard team turned a whiteboard sketch into a working prototype already shaping conversations beyond the hackathon.

Their projects earned the spotlight, but they represented a fraction of the ideas sparked during Everybody Hacks. Every team that submitted a hack received feedback on what they built, extending the experience beyond the teams that advanced.

The event’s real legacy is the skills, confidence and momentum associates carry back into their everyday work.

Everybody Hacks may be over, but somewhere across Walmart Global Tech, someone is building something we'll all want to install on Monday.