MICROSERVICES EVENT AND HACKATHON
(By Rameel Rahman, Principal Architect)
Introduction
I attended the NeST Digital “Microservices Hackathon”, the first hackathon of 2022 conducted by NeST Digital and NeST Digital Academy at Kochi. I was not just an attendee but an organizer and leader driving the hackathon. This story is my take on the events that occurred before, during, and after the hackathon.
The competency champions at NeST Digital were contemplating holding and hosting a microservices event and hackathon for some time. To avoid analysis/paralysis, we decided to freeze on a date (25th August, Thursday) and started working to build a plan to get it done! Action bias always works!
I had a great team from NeST Digital Academy (NDA) and NeST Competency Champions working with me to plan and execute this hackathon! This team rocks! We got it done…we had hiccups, but nothing useful can be done without hiccups!
The NDA Team was responsible for all the logistics — venue, lunch, welcome drink, registration, host, gifts for speakers, audio/video, presentation, diaries for participants, speaker bios, external speaker hotel stay, internal PR to get registration, external PR to attract students from universities — are just a few to name. They were well supported by NeST HR and APG Teams.
The Competency Champions (CCs for short) were responsible to seek out the speakers, plan for the lab, and select the hackathon problem statement.
The Speakers
We got great speakers from AWS, Oracle, and Intuit to speak about the role of the cloud to deploy microservices and new frontend patterns (micro-frontends) to complement microservices in the backend.
Technical Sales Consultant, Oracle
Solution Architect, AWS
Principal Engineer, Intuit
The Lab:
We also built a hands-on lab to get participants familiar with CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) and SAGA Patterns of Microservices. This required us to identify a ready example that can demonstrate the power of containerization and the patterns to the participants. During the hackathon, we had some hiccups due to infrastructure issues to execute the lab, but we promptly followed up with a write up, video, and instructions for the candidates to do the lab offline.
The coding Challenge
The main agenda was to hold a hackathon — and not just talks and labs. We decided to give the students the MT-MX Converter problem from the Banking Domain. The candidates had to build an MT (Message Type) to MX (Message XML) converter system with microservices. We scoped the problem down to MT-102/103 messages. We had to prepare and plan for cloud infrastructure that will be provisioned to build and run an MT-MX conversion system.
The Event Day
85 engineers (64 Internal, 21 External Students) registered and participated in the event, many meeting each other for the first time (post-covid). The speakers were also excited as this was the first opportunity for them to speak to a technical audience face to face! There is only so much body language you can understand over a t-con! The NeST HR/APG Team did a great job at the registration desk — patiently and accurately registering all the candidates, and welcoming them!
Rubiya and Pradeep were excellent hosts.
The event had three sections:
1. Tech Talks
2. Labs and
3. Hackathon Launch
It was great to see the new native services (IAAS, PAAS) launched by Oracle and AWS. Containers are the way to package microservices, and both platforms could orchestrate services natively and provide popular container orchestrators like K8S (Kubernetes) as a service to run microservices. Finding a service in the cloud is like finding candy in a candy store. There are so many options, and it’s not always clear what to choose and what the benefits are over other options. The participants were curious to know the scale of deployment of the services in markets served by NeST (E.g., GCC).
The participants also discussed with the speakers offline during tea breaks and lunches to seek out information that could help them in their projects! Networking is a very crucial element of such events. While we start with weather, traffic, and politics; we also like to go technical and probe some new cool ways of getting things done faster or better!
We thanked the speakers for their talks with some customized and localized gifts from Kerala.
The lunch could not have been better. There were Onam celebrations on the ground floor, and their party was creating bad noise and a good mood with the participants and speakers!
Post lunch is sleepy and drowsy — so we decided to run the hands-on lab and attempt to keep participants’ eyes open. The slow Wi-Fi and other cloud infrastructure issues played spoilsport in getting through the labs. It’s part of continuous improvement to fail and improve. We should have chosen a venue with good Wi-Fi (though we planned for dongles) and should have created the labs with proper access to avoid the challenges. It was impossible to fix errors/issues seen by participants during the lab. On the positive side, one engineer was able to complete the lab successfully.
Finally, after the starters (talks, labs) we came to the main course — THE HACKATHON. This was my show. I prepared the problem statement and worked on providing detailed inputs to participants. I explained the problem, and the business need/challenge, and answered the questions of the participants. The participants organized themselves into teams. I gave them 6D time to post the solution to the public GitHub repository. A common WhatsApp group was created for the participants to raise their queries and for the mentors to support them.
The end date for submission of all the artifacts was 30th August 2022 11:59:59 PM. An extension of 2D was given to the teams if they failed to submit on the scheduled end date, but with a negative mark for a late submission. An evaluation panel with a group of experts in various technologies was created and the evaluation was done in the next 3 days.
The teams were allowed to present a working demo and share the other artifacts specified in the guidelines, in front of the jury panel. Teams were evaluated on their pitching, presentation, innovation, confidence, and overall idea. Judging is terrible, but we in the jury were all experienced in this art. A major advantage of experience/age is learning to accept people without passing judgment. It was a humbling experience to see the speed, energy, and enthusiasm of the participants!
The Judging Criteria
● Completeness of Project
○ How complete is the entrant’s solution compared to the envisioned product?
○ Does the project achieve all the proposed objectives?
■ Microservices Architecture Pattern
■ Asynchronous messaging
■ Third-party integration
■ RESTful API
■ Performance
■ Testing and Code coverage
● Solution Impact and Problem Solving
○ Does the project solve a problem?
○ To what degree will the component have an impact on solving the identified problem?
● Commercial Potential
○ Does the business model/method(s) of the solution make sense?
○ Is it possible to reuse the components
● Presentation
○ Was the presentation engaging, appealing and impressive to the judging panel?
○ How well did the presenter(s) utilize the allotted time?
○ Was the presentation well received?
That said, we had to rank the teams … so the winners of the hackathon were felicitated on 28th September by Nazneen (NeST Digital CEO), Pradeep (NeST Digital Academy, AVP), and Dileep (NeST Digital, HR, VP & Head):
The Winners
Team Back Bencher (Zishan Ahamad, Harsh Gupta, Vatsal Sinha, Sagar Raj, Yogesh Raj) from IIIT, Kottayam won the hackathon and a cash prize of Rs. 75,000/-. They were able to crack the problem statement, followed and shared all the artifacts said in the guidelines, and presented impressive teamwork. The solution was developed in NodeJS technology and deployed both on-premise and Azure cloud.
First Runner-up
Team CARBON (Anoop P M, John Christo, Manu Fasil) from NeST Digital was declared the first runner-up and bagged a cash prize of Rs. 50,000. They were able to crack the problem statement and followed and shared most of the artifacts said in the guidelines. The solution was developed in Java technology and deployed in the Azure cloud.
Second Runner-up
Team Omega (Akhil M Reji, Raunak Kumar Singh, Amritansh Singh, Basit Sheikh) from IIIT, Kottayam was declared the second runner-up and bagged a cash prize of Rs. 25,000. They were able to crack the problem statement and followed/shared most of the artifacts said in the guidelines. The solution was developed in NodeJS technology and deployed in the Azure cloud.
Outcomes & Follow-up
All of the teams were able to crack the problem and came up with solutions of their own and were able to present it in-front of the panel, so the evaluation and the winner selection was tough.
To keep the engagement with this awesome group alive, we sent the lab video and access links along with a BLOG writing competition. Participation certificates were also shared that they could post on their LinkedIn.
This is a start of a journey. My Blog is the first one, and I hope to see more technical blogs from the participants posted. We are a technology community, and this community can grow and improve when we share and learn from each other! I found hackathon as a great medium to build a thriving technology community that seeks to build excellence in technology!
I wrote this blog/story (my first one) to invite all of you to share your stories, learnings, experiences, or knowledge with the community.
Thank You!
