For the second year in a row, a hackathon was organized at VMworld Barcelona. The hackathon is mainly to provide the VMware {code} community with a fun and energizing space to “learn, code and connect” and create cool new things the world needs. And so we did 😉
If you’re new to the VMware {code} hackathons and expect only evil hacking, you are not completely wrong but:
- Hackathons are open to experts and newbies alike.
- Participants don’t actually need to know how to code to be a productive member of a team
- Ideas don’t have to be limited to VMware products. But yeah, strangely enough, most ideas hovered around the large VMware product suite….
Why participate?
Isn’t it obvious from the intro ;)? But okay…for me participating in the Hackathon had the following reasons:
- Foremost: the community and participating in the community.
- Secondly: doing new things will only grow and make you a better person. Not scripting or getting first, but this way of interacting is new for me at a conference and also the third reason:
- Thirdly: I do some PowerCLI/PowerNSX scripting occasionally. I learned from blogging and GitHub that with interacting you will only get better at it. Sometimes mistakes happen and you will need a different view to set you straight.
Altogether pros and no cons equal sign up and get in there to enjoy!
Schedule
The schedule for the evening is as follow:
18:30 – 18:45 Welcome & introductions
18:45 – 22:30 Teams work on their ideas
22:30 – 22:45 Teams do their pitch presentations (90-second pitch)
22:45 – 23:45 Winning team announcement and Party like an evil Hax0r
Teams and experience
Teams were formed by first of all scheduling and in turn register for Hackathon Event: Teams hack on ideas! in the VMworld Europe schedule builder. Next to schedule this event you would have to find a team to join or start a new team as lead. So off to find a team. I browsed through the team list, and however I also saw some other very interesting ideas, I signed on to team one. The description of the team: Improving and expanding the Horizon View vCheck and maybe add some stuff to the community Horizon View Module as well. Horizon and vCheck are combining two of my interest what seems like a good starting point and would allow me to bring something to the table for the team.
In total there was space for ten teams with up to eight team participants. And in addition to this, there was room for supporters or other party people guests to cheer on their favorite teams!
This was a fully booked event.
It was a fun bunch of people meeting up and sharing some common goals. There were smart ideas out there and great results from the teams. We learned some lessons for the next time, such as not losing too much time in prepping a Horizon environment (darn Windows) and have some backup plans D E F. In the end we as a team reached the goals set for the evening, we had fun and learned some things. And we even succeeded in creating and committing some updates to the Horizon plugins for vCheck to GitHub
I will certainly sign up if the Hackathon returns next year.
– Thank you, I really enjoyed!
Sources: https://blogs.vmware.com/code/.
