Announcing the winner of the build on incident.io contest

We challenged our developer community to show us the "coolest, weirdest ways" to showcase our developer platform with a pretty serious prize for the winner: a shiny new Macbook Pro.

We expected some neat dashboards and maybe a clever Slack bot or two. What we got: A Severance-inspired wellness intervention system that tracks incident responder mental health through interpretive dance emojis.

I'm not making this up.

When you give engineers good APIs and ask them to get creative, amazing things can happen.

How we judged

Before we dive into the submissions, let's talk about how we evaluated them. We weren't just looking for technical prowess; we wanted projects that were both useful and fun!

Creativity and originality 💡

Is this something we haven't seen before? Does it make us go, "Whoa, that's clever"? We wanted fresh perspectives.

Technical implementation and functionality ⚙️

How well is it built? Is the code clean, stable, and efficient? Did it make good use of the MCP server, API, or webhooks?

Usefulness and potential impact 💥

Does this solve a real problem or meaningfully improve the incident experience? Would someone in the real world actually use it?

"Wow" factor 🤩

It's intangible, but you know it when you see it. Does this project stand out above the rest? Sometimes it's technical elegance, sometimes it's creative audacity, sometimes it's just solving a problem we didn't know we had.

With these criteria in mind, every submission brought something unique to the table.

Here were the five finalists

1. Calendar Conflicts Reporter

Calendar Conflicts Reporter automatically detects conflicts between incident.io on-call schedules and calendar events, identifying when on-call personnel have scheduled time off and reporting these conflicts to affected team members via Slack DM or email.

The tool integrates with any ICS calendar feed (Google Calendar, BambooHR, Outlook) and ships as a production-ready Docker container, GitHub Action, or Helm chart that solves the universal pain point of discovering your on-call engineer is on vacation after an incident hits.

2. Alexa Incident Commander

Alexa Incident Commander is an Alexa skill that provides voice-controlled access to incident.io data through natural language commands, enabling hands-free incident status updates perfect for war rooms and on-call engineers.

The system uses AWS Lambda to orchestrate requests between Alexa devices and a local bridge server that connects to the incident.io MCP server, with Claude AI powering natural language response generation to deliver real-time incident information through conversational voice interactions.

3. Incident Scorecard Check

Incident Scorecard Check is a Python tool that integrates incident.io and Cortex.io APIs to analyze the correlation between incidents and service health by fetching public incidents from a configurable lookback period (default 30 days) and cross-referencing them with Cortex.io scorecard data for impacted services.

The tool generates comprehensive reports showing service impact analysis, ranking services by incident frequency alongside their operational readiness and security scorecard scores, helping teams understand how incidents affect overall service health metrics and identify services with both high incident rates and failing scorecard rules.

4. Heatmap Monitoring

Heatmap Monitoring is a comprehensive real-time incident management dashboard built with Node.js/Fastify backend and Next.js frontend that provides advanced visualization and monitoring capabilities including an interactive time × service heatmap showing incident density with severity-based coloring, live SLA countdown timers with color-coded status indicators, and a real-time active incident board.

The system integrates with incident.io through webhooks and API calls, delivering monitoring features like Server-Sent Events for instant dashboard updates, comprehensive analytics with trend analysis, and professional UI optimized for operations centers.

5. Last but not least, the winner: WARP Bot - Wellness After Resolution Protocol

This is where things get wonderfully weird.

If you haven't watched Severance on Apple TV+, it's a psychological thriller about work-life balance taken to its dystopian extreme. Employees have their work and personal memories surgically separated. The show is dark, surreal, and surprisingly relevant to anyone who's felt consumed by their job.

One developer built a Slack bot that sends "mandatory wellness interventions" styled after the show's unsettling corporate wellness programs after you resolve an incident.

Instead of trying to explain it, the developer put together a fun video of the bot in action. Please watch it, you do not want to make Kier angry.

Your turn to build

Thanks for everyone who participated! We really enjoyed going through each of the apps. You all did a great job, but someone had to win. And the WARP bot was the perfect combo of technical excellence, creativity, and fun!

What are you going to build? The next contest might be sooner than you think. The Board has been pleased with your compliance with innovation protocols.

Get started at docs.incident.io.

Start building. Take breaks. Stay weird.