The VMware code Hackathon was on last night. The inaugural event headed up by Alan Renouf and William Lam saw 6 teams of people hack it out for a few hours to create something cool. Piling into the room there were 5 Intel NUCs on the table loaded with vCSA, vSphere, and VSAN. Using NVMe storage the VSAN clusters were up and running nicely.
Here is the photo of everyone who ‘hacked’ away last night:
We were handed some rules which were translated into the following
- Have fun
- Don’t be a jerk
The teams chatted, deliberating, coded, raged, walked around, cheered with excitement, then got together at the end to present the results. The judges were wandering around, asking questions, and wanted to know what was coming. We had engineering leads, performance engineers, and Mr Lam doing the judging.
The presentations in themselves were hilarious. The trials and tribulations to the scope creep and lab blowups all resulted in lots of laughs, fun, and the display of talented peoples solutions!
Some examples that came out of this Hackathon were:
* vCheck improvements
* Pester Tests with Visualisation
* Auto-scale, VMfork, Haproxy
* VSAN data extraction with Snap/Grafana
Congratulations to the Auto-scale team and to the winner of the fully loaded NUC.
I think one of the best things about this session was that each team wanted to continue with the idea after the fact. The teams, although distributed, wanted to see the ideas come to more than just a hackathon prototype.
My background is not coding. I don’t do this for a day job. I ended up being a team lead. I threw myself in the deep end and learnt heaps last night. Damned awesome if you ask me. Next event you go to you need to challenge yourself. You learn so much outside of your box.
VMware{code} is here to stay and judging on the success of last night I feel that Hackathons may come to a VMworld near you. Thank you to Maurius, William and Alan for putting it on and all together.