On March 19th, 2018, at the Galloway in the 1931 Conference Centre in the Netherlands, VMware {code} and NLVMUG held their first Hackathon with the theme “Fun, Beers and Gyros.” Sixteen participants in three teams worked diligently from 1:30 in the afternoon for six hours until 8:30 at night, only taking a break to eat some delicious gyros, reenergize with some sugar and caffeine, or grab stickers and souvenirs from the giveaway table.
A gyro learning, coding, and connecting
Hard at work coding before breaking into the soda
The giveaway table, moments before becoming completely empty
Each of the three teams had their own unique visions for their projects. At the end of the night, three judges, Boudewijn Aelbers, Joep Piscaer, and Wouter Kursten awarded the teams a retro gaming console for their hard work.
Vintage game console
Taking home the prize for Best in IOT, the team from PQR created a way to integrate vRealize Automation with the Homey home automation controller to initiate a deployment using voice commands. They used a Philips Hue lightbulb to indicate the status of the deployment based on its color and a moving Lego Mindstorms robot that would move an object to a different zone on the table to represent the stage of deployment. And, as an added bonus, if would throw the object off the table if the VM request was requested.
Lego Mindstorm robot built by the PQR team
The team from ITQ won Best in Cloud Native for their project that created a way to deploy a Minecraft server using BOSH through voice commands via an Amazon Echo. Taking it one step further, they then deployed a Kubernetes cluster using BOSH and initiated it using more voice commands. The Minecraft character Steve guides the user through the deployment process on a custom interface created by the team.
Steve from Minecraft guiding deployment
The third and final team came from DICTU and won the prize for Most Innovative. They created a way to fully automate deployment of a secure tenant and infrastructure (IaaS) in which everything was secured, error-free, and auditable. The deployed virtual machines were encrypted using VM Encryption with HyTrust as the key management and were micro-segmented using NSX. Intra-VM and vMotion traffic were encrypted using SSL to further increase security. Finally, the team used vRealize Network Insight and vRealize Operations to monitor the security on that infrastructure.
Every team impressed the judges with their projects, and with the help of food, drink, and innovation, the energy brought back the strong community feeling of the early days of the NLVMUG UserCon. Overall, the team behind the Hackathon thought it turned out to be a resounding success, and they are looking forward outdoing themselves next year.
The Hackathon was a huge success, we set out to create a fun and relaxed time and going back to the core of the VMUG community, which worked out exceptionally! Next year is going to be even more awesome.
– Martijn Smit, NLVMUG Hackathon Organizer & NSX Specialist, VMware
The participants were very enthusiastic; the comradery was great to see. If it’s up to me there will be an even greater, bigger hackathon in 2019!
–Erik Scholten, Cloud Management Specialist, VMware
Interested in running your own Hackathon in your region? Contact us at code@vmware.com or @vmwarecode for more information about our VMware {code} Experiences.
Photo credits: Alex Muetstege, TAM
