Win $20K at the Cloud Native Hackathon with Kelsey Hightower
Join us on Monday, November 9 at The Shop Workspace in Salt Lake City for a full day of building with developers from the cloud native community. Pick something that makes conferences painful, fix it using tools from Sonar, Dash0, Radar and Elasticsearch, then demo it to Kelsey Hightower and the judges. There's $20,000 in cash prizes across four sponsor tracks, an iPad and AirPods in the Merge Forward track, and everyone gets $50 in OpenAI credits plus swag.
Everyone is welcome, whether it's your first hackathon or your fiftieth. This is an in-person event, and we can't cover travel or accommodation.
Everything you need is here
All the resources, track details, judging criteria, setup guides and links are on the hackathon page: wemakedevs.org/hackathons/cnh. Check it out before the day so you can hit the ground running.
The challenge
Conferences are one of the best parts of tech, and also kind of a mess. Talks clash, rooms fill up, the best conversations happen in the hallway and you leave with 40 new connections you can't place. Your challenge is to make conferences easier, before, during or after, for attendees, speakers, sponsors or the people running the whole thing.
Tracks and prizes
Sonar: Never Merge Broken ($5,000) with Gitar, Sonar's AI code verification agent
Dash0: Stop Flying Blind ($5,000) with Dash0's OpenTelemetry based observability platform
Radar: AI SRE ($5,000) with Radar, the open source Kubernetes UI with an AI SRE
Elasticsearch: Find the Right Talk ($5,000) with Elasticsearch, the search engine and vector database
Merge Forward: Conferences for Everyone (iPad) for the project that makes conferences more inclusive and accessible. On top of that, 5 Merge Forward members win AirPods Pro and 5 win AirPods 5.
Every participant also gets $50 in OpenAI credits and swag. Your project can enter every sponsor track whose tool it genuinely uses, plus the Merge Forward track.
Merge Forward
Merge Forward is the CNCF community that builds safe, supportive spaces for people from underrepresented backgrounds and their allies in open source, with groups like Women in Cloud Native, Neurodiversity, and Deaf and Hard of Hearing. We want this hackathon to feel welcoming to everyone, so we're bringing the community along with its own track and prizes.
Judges
Kelsey Hightower
Saiyam Pathak, Founder of Kubesimplify
Joseph Sandoval, Principal Product Manager at Adobe and Vice Chair of the CNCF End User Technical Advisory Board
More judges to be announced
Agenda
All times are Mountain Time.
9:00 am: Check-in opens
10:00 am: Breakfast
11:00 am to 1:00 pm: Kickoff, track walkthrough and sponsor sessions
1:00 pm to 2:00 pm: Build time
2:00 pm: Lunch and a panel Q&A with Kelsey Hightower
Until 6:00 pm: More build time, with coffee breaks in between
6:00 pm to 7:00 pm: Project presentations, judging and winners announcement
What to bring
Your laptop, your charger and the will to experiment and learn. The hackathon page has a short checklist of accounts and tools to set up before you arrive.
After party 🎉
Once the winners are announced, come hang out with us at House of Kube, presented by Platform Engineering and hosted by Tailscale and Temporal. Expect platform engineers, founders and folks from across the cloud native community, with good food, craft cocktails (zero-proof too) and music, all on the house. Entry is free, so bring your teammates along. It's invite only, but your registration is confirmed right away and the venue address shows up once you sign up here.