Dropbox engineers also spent a lot of time working on tools for improved collaboration in shared Office documents (for those not using one of Microsoft’s online tools like Office.com), a problem as old as Dropbox itself. The company began tackling it earlier this year with Project Harmony, a feature that would let Office users see when others were accessing shared documents through Dropbox. There were at least three Hack Week projects building on those tools, trying to bring more Google Docs-style collaboration and editing to Dropbox — a pretty clear example of the company’s need to move beyond just managing simple files.

There’s also a lot of work that falls outside the silly and the product-focused — with 800 people, there are plenty of employees who don’t call themselves coders. One of the biggest such initiatives is Dropbox For Good, an ongoing charity program that donated Dropbox business accounts to non-profits and collected clothing for charities. Other projects focused on doing little things to make the lives of employees better, like new office maps with a grid system to help people find conference rooms easier or a giant panda two employees spent the week sewing. Of course, they also hooked the panda up to the Dropbox’s code logs and gave it glowing LED lights — if an employee breaks the code, the eyes light up red and a small screen chastises the employee at fault.

Getting back to its roots is a joke that Dropbox takes very seriously

Hack Week is about getting the company "back to its roots." The catchphrase is thrown around enough that it’s a bit of a joke at this point, but it is something taken seriously from the top of the organization down through everyone I met. "Things have gotten a little more formal — back in the day, people were here till 2AM, the Tuck Shop [Dropbox’s kitchen] was flipping burgers the whole time," says Jon Ying, one of Dropbox’s first employees and a prime organizer of Hack Week. "But last night I was here late and there weren’t many people left — there’s a lot more people with kids and families than there used to be."

With its Hack Week, Dropbox is trying to reclaim the feeling of a small team coming together and pushing themselves to create something new. Like numerous other companies in and outside of Silicon Valley with similar programs, Dropbox is now big enough that it can no longer be a free-for-all of engineers coding whatever they please — but there’s a benefit to infusing the office with that spirit, even if it’s only for five days. Dropbox made that clear at the awards ceremony, when engineer and MC Jean-Denis Greze noted that awards were almost meaningless in the context of Hack Week — what’s most important is the collaboration. Anything Dropbox can put into a product and ship is a bonus.