You may not be aware, but something big is about to happen within the Developer Community at HPE. On May 24, HPE developers from around the world will participate in the group’s first hackathon.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a hackathon is a coding contest where developers, programmers, and other creative experts come together to collaborate on a range of software development topics. Participants work quickly – often over a short period of time – to innovate and solve challenges, resulting in creating usable software everyone can use.

Hackathons are becoming popular and useful activities because they foster innovation through collaboration and creative problem solving. They can also stimulate some interesting results. For instance, this article tells how 13 new startup companies were created during hackathons, which demonstrates the power of harnessing the expertise of a creative group of people.

“Hackathons let developers go beyond their business-as-usual, day-to-day operations – giving them the opportunity to work with other talented people on a particular challenge over a short timeframe,”

explains Said A. Syed, Director -- Developer Experience and Product Incubation, HPE Software-Defined and Cloud Group.

“This type of concentrated brainpower and effort can lead to transformative innovation that produces new and disruptive solutions, capabilities, and products.”

HPE Hackathon – focus on HPE OneSphere

The HPE Hackathon will be hosted in Fort Collins, Colorado where developers will attend in person. Others will join remotely from all over the world -- Poland, Brazil, India, Sweden, Ireland, Canada, and other areas of the United States. Forty-six attendees make up nineteen different teams. The teams include up to five people with names such as India Matrix Master, Spectrum Spiders, Last Bench Squad, Kubewarriors, Say What?, and Reality Distortion.

For this event, the focus for the hackathon is surrounding HPE OneSphere API. A variety of projects are already in the works that will provide the Open Source community with more integration modules for HPE OneSphere, HPE’s new hybrid-cloud management platform.

What’s happening?

Officially, the hackathon started with a two hour training session on the HPE OneSphere API, held on May 10th. Following this training, all attendees were provided an account on a live prepopulated HPE OneSphere platform.

May 24-25 is when things really get serious, as coaching and finalizing sessions are available to help participants finish their projects. The following week, participants will create a 15 minute presentation about what they have accomplished, which gets presented to the judges on June 4. Winners will be announced on June 5th. Throughout June HPE experts within the developer community will be working with the teams to publish the open source hackathon code as onto HPE Github, where it become available to everyone to use and improve upon.

Participants on the winning team will each receive a high-end drone. If a team’s project can be open sourced and is pushed to the HPE Github, each team member will receive either an Amazon Echo Dot or Google Home Mini. And all hackathon participants will receive HPE swag (T-shirts and other fun gifts).

Fun collaboration that leads to innovation and benefits customer

Alex Mejias, Senior Fullstack Developer and one of the HPE Hackathon organizers explains the purpose of the event.

“This hackathon provides a fun and social format to collaborate with HPE subject matter experts to create new ideas around existing software. And most of the projects created during the hackathon will be put through HPE’s Open Source Review Board (OSRB) to be available for free to the public.”

Another HPE Hackathon organizer, Didier Lalli, Distinguished Technologist at HPE, details some of the projects that are planned.

“Projects range from front end data visualizations using libraries like D3 and Grafana, to DevOps with Ansible and Terraform, to Chat bots. We wanted to provide a set of topics that use HPE OneSphere’s REST API to its fullest potential. We’re covering the full stack rainbow here; our goal is to push the boundaries on what can be developed.”

The hackathon organizers have established a permanent Slack channel to support live questions from the participants. They’ve also assembled a geographically dispersed team in EMEA and on both the east and west coast of the United States to provide constant support for all of the teams during the event May 24-25.

Syed is looking forward to the HPE hackathon and excited about the anticipated benefits for HPE customers.

“HPE is in a unique position to solve complex problems for our customers. During the hackathon, HPE experts are taking on 19 projects that present unique real-world challenges and working together to solve them. The hackathon is a fun way to bring an amazing group of talented people together to solve some of these challenges quickly.”

Good luck to all the participants of the HPE Hackathon!