[Hackathon] Build with Kelsey Hightower for $20K + DGX Spark

​Join us on Monday, November 9 at The Shop Workspace in Salt Lake City for a full day of building alongside 200 developers from the cloud native community.

​Everyone is welcome, whether it’s your first hackathon or your fiftieth, and you can come on your own or with a team. This is an in-person event, and we can’t cover travel or accommodation.

​Learn more about the challenge and the prizes below 👇

​📚 Everything you need is here

​All the resources, track details, judging criteria, setup guides and links are on the hackathon page. 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

• ​Best overall project: NVIDIA DGX Spark. The strongest project of the day, from any track, wins a DGX Spark.

• ​Sonar: Never Merge Broken ($4,000) with Gitar, Sonar’s AI code verification agent

• ​Dash0: Stop Flying Blind ($4,000) with Dash0’s OpenTelemetry based observability platform

• ​Radar: AI SRE ($4,000) with Radar, the open source Kubernetes UI with an AI SRE

• ​Elasticsearch: Find the Right Talk ($4,000) with Elasticsearch, the search engine and vector database

• ​Merge Forward: Conferences for Everyone (iPad) for the project that makes conferences more inclusive and accessible

• ​Top 10 builders: a signed copy of Kubernetes Up & Running, signed in person by co-author Kelsey Hightower

• ​Everyone who shows up: a free Keychron mechanical keyboard, $50 in OpenAI credits, swag and a certificate

​Your project can enter every sponsor track whose tool it genuinely uses, plus the Merge Forward track, and every project is in the running for best overall.

​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.

​⏰ Agenda (all times Mountain Time)

• ​9:00 AM: Check-in and breakfast

• ​10:00 AM: Kickoff and workshops from our partner tools

• ​11:00 AM: Building starts

• ​1:00 PM: Lunch

• ​2:00 PM: Panel with Kelsey Hightower

• ​2:30 PM: Back to building

• ​5:30 PM: Project submissions close, then presentations and judging

• ​6:30 PM: Winners announced

• ​7:00 PM: After party

​Check-in opens at 9:00 AM. Try to get there by 9:30 so you’re settled in before kickoff at 10:00.

​✅ Before you arrive

• ​Set up your Gitar (Sonar) and Dash0 accounts

• ​If you’re going for the Radar or Elasticsearch tracks, have Docker and a Kubernetes cluster ready

• ​Bring your laptop, your charger and the will to experiment and learn

​🎉 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.