VMworld 2016 Barcelona - Hackathon

This post is about my experience with the VMworld 2016 Barcelona Hackathon. Since I had never participated in such an event, I wasn’t sure about signing up. I hope that after reading this post, you consider signing up for any such Hackathon in the future, whether it is an internal event, VMUG gathering, VMworld, or any similar gathering of tech-geeks like me and many of the readers of this blog!

Story

At VMworld US this year, Alan Renouf and VMware {CODE} @vmwarecode put on a Hackathon. You can read more about the event VMware Code Hackathon Europe Edition. I didn’t bother signing up because I was unfamiliar with the concept and just thought I’d be too busy with other activities.

Apparently, the event was quite successful and people had a great time so the team decided to do another one in Barcelona. The process started with a blog post and some tweets requesting project ideas for the event. Once the projects were decided upon, a Google Sheet was setup for teams to sign up on. Again, I didn’t bother signing up … initially… It wasn’t until Alan sent me a couple more tweets encouraging me to sign up for one of the projects that had been submitted by Mads Fog Albrechtslund and accepted: An HTML 5 Front-End for vRealize Orchestrator. Unfortunately, Mads wasn’t able to participate in the event, but his idea was sound and of interest to a few people so I went ahead and signed up after I saw a couple other people on the sign-up sheet for the topic. I figured why not, I can contribute some vRO Knowledge, meet some new people, and if things go very well and I win - well then I would have a slightly-used Intel NUC to play with since that is the prize for the winning team !

Team

As my trip to Barcelona approached, I kept checking the sign-up sheet to see if more people had joined.. I was disappointed as I discovered the day before my trip that the other people had dropped off the sheet! Crap, well I’m not enough of a front-end developer to do this project on my own so I removed myself from the list as well and left my laptop at home for the VMworld Barcelona trip.

Wouldn’t you know it, as soon as I land in Barcelona and check my mail I have a message from Alan: Where’d you go? You have a team now! Ok, great, I put my name back on the list and went to the event. Not only did Team #5 come together, but we won!! From Left to Right:

Prize!

And here’s what each member of our team won!

Since there were only 4 of us and 7 NUCs total, the other 3 were awarded to members of a couple of the other teams.

Project: DunesBuggy Log In Screen

Project: DunesBuggy Workflow Listing

Due to time constraints around the Hackathon, this was as far as the project got, but not bad!!! We were able to pull up a browser, authenticate to the vRO server and get a list of the available workflows in an easy to read format.

Further development of this project will be done as time permits on dunebuggy github.

Additional Photos from the Event

Each team worked together at a table on their respective projects…

A FUN TIME FOR ALL

At the end of the night, we had the entire group get together for a photo!