On 4 July 2019, we hosted the very first Bio-IT hackathon. We invited our community members from various research groups/departments a few months ahead of the event and asked them to think of projects that they could pitch for this hackathon. In order to provide a selection of topics, we encouraged project ideas ranging from developing technical tools to writing documents. We were successful at drawing 16 contributors from different research and non-research groups to participate in this event.