Hackathons vary in sizes and shapes, but ours has typically been a 24-hour sprint, with teams submitting a five-minute video presenting their project. This year was our biggest hackathon yet, with almost 90 teams registering across a multitude of departments including Support, Sales, Product, Technical Writing, and, of course, Engineering! We crowdsource the first-round judging by asking anyone at Rubrik to participate in evaluating projects. Then we have a panel of experts, including board member and former Symantec CEO Enrique Salem, select winners from the top 10.
Like years in the past, the variety and ingenuity of the projects was nothing short of amazing. Themes included:
Integrations with third-party technologies like HashiCorp Vault, Slack, Shopify, NetSuite, etc.
Monitoring and reduction of cloud costs
New uses of container technologies
Improving interviewing, hiring, product documentation, and bug triaging
Even identifying target companies for acquisition
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most popular project theme this year was security. It’s my pleasure to announce this year's winners.
Most Impact - Project Mercury
Like one of last year’s winners, Blueshift, team Project Mercury focused on VMware performance. The team was able to demonstrate a 4x and 5x improvement on VMware ingest and export respectively! Congrats to:
Yang Yang
Hao Zhou
Li Ding
Yiyao Wu
Most Impact in Data Security - The Unfair Advantage
Team The Unfair Advantage built a generic policy framework to extend our Data Classification functionality to databases protected with Rubrik. It’s been said that most innovation is incremental–extending or adapting a bit of existing functionality to a novel use case to deliver massive value; this project fits the bill! Congrats to:
Chris Lumnah
Ganesh Balbharathi
Frank Schwaak
Michael Oglesby
Most Innovative - The 11th Hour
Too late for a more creative team name, but never too late to use container technology for assisting in live mounting databases, as this team demonstrated! Congrats to:
Udbhav Prasad
Prasenjit Sarkar
Best In Show - Something, Something, Ransomware
And finally, our best in show winner, who built, you guessed it: team Something, Something for Ransomware detection and remediation. By combining disparate data sources into a single unified timeline, the team was able to present incident responders with a single pane of glass to visualize the incident history along with the affected data. Congrats to:
Ben Meadowcroft
Rama Naageswaran
Wrap Up
The hackathon has been described as one of the most fun days of the year, and this year’s hackathon did not disappoint. Congratulations to the winners and big thanks to all the planners, participants, and judges!