This year, and for the first time at an HPE Technology and Solutions Summit, the HPE Developer Program decided to deliver a Hack Shack experience to event attendees. During the week of March 11 in Paris, France we offered developer and designer centric activities to 3,200 HPE and partner presales employees. In this very special Hack Shack – complete with modern décor, a comfortable sofa, an expresso machine, and video games – HPE hosted technical workshops for attendees to follow along on their own laptops and learn how to use the Application Programming Interfaces (API) for such HPE products as HPE OneView, HPE OneSphere, HPE SimpliVity and the HPE OneView Global Dashboard

One didn’t need to be a developer to participate in these well-attended workshops; anyone could join to understand what it means to use REST APIs. The idea behind the Hack Shack was to make the event attendees feel more comfortable discussing APIs with DevOps and DevIT staff. The tools used during these labs included Postman and scripting languages such as PowerShell or Python. The Hack Shack also came fully equipped with Macs and PCs; so in case someone forgot to bring their laptop, they could still participate. We also hosted a session explaining both the HPE DEV program and the Design@HPE program. Dana and Parul offer some more insights into Design@HPE in this short interview that was placed on Twitter

On Wednesday afternoon and Friday morning, we hosted simple hackathons. We proposed a number of challenges to our attendees, using the same HPE OneView, HPE OneSphere, HPE SimpliVity, and HPE OneView Global Dashboard APIs. The most innovative, passionate, and creative ways to solve the challenges were rewarded with cool gifts, like a Fitbit watch and RasberryPi units. We ran 17 sessions in the Hack Shack, which were attended by 251 participants. All in all, we learned a lot and had a lot of fun.

Want to see more? Check out Didier’s interview on Twitter