Hack Day 2023: Innovation League Winner Stories
By Katie Marshall, Engineering Experience Project Specialist, Joe Dougherty, Product Architect, Simone Lippolis, Data Visualization Practitioner, Rob Webb, Solutions Engineer, Alvaro Berruga Alvarez, Software Engineering Technical Leader, Enrique Perez, Marketing Manager, Shimei Cridlig, Technical Marketing Engineer, and Aparna Bhavsar, Engineering Program Manager
As we prepare to kick off our 2024 Hack Day: Innovation League this June, we wanted to look back at the winners of our 2023 event.
For those who may be unfamiliar, a hackathon (as it’s typically called) is an event where team members from different departments come together to solve a problem or explore a new idea. The innovative project ideas can revolve around boosting our business, helping teams work better together, or making our day-to-day work more exciting.
Last year, participants competed in a variety of categories, including Business Value, Cross Collaboration, Community Impact, Tech Innovation, and Productivity.
Below, we’re highlighting how last year’s winners came up with their unique ideas, their favorite part of their project or Hack Day overall, and what they have been up to since their win.
Cross Collaborative Award
Team Techies
The ThousandEyes Techdocs team uses a “docs-as-code” model to develop our public documentation at docs.thousandeyes.com Tech writers use many of the same tools and processes that our engineering teams use, like issue trackers, git repositories, and code reviews. The resulting public docs site is built and served through a third-party SaaS, which generally meets our needs but sometimes leaves us wanting more. For Hack Day 2023, Team Techies sought to build a custom static-site generator with purpose-built functionality for a docs site and improve the continuous integration and continuous delivery processes for the Techdocs team.
In my role as a Product Solutions Architect, I work very closely with the Techdocs team, from reviewing and contributing to documentation for upcoming features or product launches to writing best practices and getting started articles that live on the public docs site. As a former Software Engineer, I now write much less code than I used to, but still sometimes look at a public SaaS and think, “I could build that in a weekend!” Hack Day seemed like the perfect opportunity to scratch my “coding itch” to help out our fantastic Techdocs team and to work with some ThousandEyes superheroes I don’t otherwise work with closely on a daily basis.
The best part about working on this project was working with our cross-functional team: we had members from Product Management, Tech Docs, Customer Engineering, UX/Design, Site Reliability Engineering, and the Product Solutions Architecture team. Seeing each team member’s strengths shine brightly, from our SRE’s improvements to CI/CD to our designer’s reimagined theme for the docs site, made the sleep deprivation of a 24-hour hackathon totally worth it!
Today our Techdocs team is still using a docs-as-code model, and still building and serving the public docs site through that same third-party SaaS. We do not have plans to roll the Hack Day project itself into a production system. However, what we learned from building this project and working together have still been put to use as we continue to explore off-the-shelf and open-source static site generators, and are maintaining compatibility with one such project in the event we want or need to switch away from the SaaS solution we use today.
Tech Innovation Award
Flow Garden
For Hack Day 2023, we wanted to find a creative way to give a sense of the amount of data we collect and analyze every day with ThousandEyes. The data source is our Spoofing Detection software DB, which is part of the Catalyst suite. The goal was to show how much data we analyze and how fast we can do it.
The AI spoofing detection software we used for this project collects net-flows data and analyzes them in real-time to detect “foreign agents.” In fact, it is like someone seated at the top of a tower, staring at the horizon, waiting for invaders. Or like a photographer with a broken leg who sits at the rear window of his apartment, like in a Hitchcock movie. The idea was to tell the story of this bot who loves trees but, like the movie’s protagonist, is stuck at a window, staring at flowing data. To cheer up his days, he draws this data in the form of trees. This is the reason why the charts have this “dirty” look and feel; we wanted them to look like they were hand-drawn. This is the reason why, in the project, we called our bot Jeff as an homage to Hitchcock’s movie.
We’ve been able to create an unusual chart, something that you don’t see very often. We used SVG filters to make it hand drawn using real-time data. This was a very challenging project, and we made it.
Packet Sentinels
For Hack Day 2023, we developed a solution to improve packet loss detection. Using data we already collect from existing tests, which uses the SACK (Selective Acknowledgements) probe method, we determined in which direction packet loss was occurring, even if we are only testing agent to server. The options included:
- Outbound (Agent to Target)
- Inbound (Target to Agent)
The best part about this experience (other than winning the Tech Innovation Award) was building the story around developing a new superpower to help catch the notorious villain, Packet Loss.
Productivity Award
ChatWithThousandEyes
Trained using ThousandEyes public and internal documentation, this Hack Day 2023 project aimed to create a chat for ThousandEyes employees to ask questions about our different products, and how they work internally.
The goal was to empower our customer engineering (CE) team by giving them tools to understand our products better without relying on the engineering team. This way, engineers can focus on new features while CE can concentrate on making our customers happy.
Benefits of the project included learning more about AI, training different models to see their responses, and working across teams.
No news at the moment on this project. Some licensing issues stopped us from developing it further, but it’s something that we should definitely come back to at some point. 🙂
Community Impact Award
Energy Insights by ThousandEyes
We established Energy Insights with the goal of contributing to the betterment of our planet and meeting the growing demand for sustainable technology in the market. Currently, enterprises lack the ability to monitor the power consumption and carbon footprint of their network infrastructure beyond their premises. This is due to the fact that the Internet can be challenging to measure and monitor due to its distributed nature and noise.
We developed Energy Insights to help enterprises assess the environmental impact of their wide area network (WAN) without sacrificing performance. Its applications include:
- Selecting energy-efficient network paths without compromising performance.
- Optimizing bulk data transfers or large loads for carbon efficiency.
- Validating technology sustainability recommendations with data before making significant investments or strategic changes.
Despite efforts to secure a patent for this innovative idea, the attempt ultimately did not come to fruition due to a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, the organizing team remains optimistic and retains a positive outlook on the potential of our innovation.
Leadership Choice Award
ThousandPilot
During Hack Day 2023, we as a team developed an innovative platform tool that enables customers to automatically opt-in to beta features, inspired by a similar program offered by Meraki. Recognizing the potential to enhance user experience and accelerate product adoption, my team and I were unanimous in our enthusiasm for this initiative. The development process was a testament to the collaborative spirit and diverse strengths of our team members. In a 24-hour timeframe, each person contributed significantly, leveraging their unique skills to advance the project.
To streamline the transition from concept to production, I crafted a comprehensive one-pager that outlined the tool’s functionality, benefits, and implementation strategy. This document was crucial in securing executive buy-in and facilitating discussions about resource allocation.
The introduction of this tool promises to improve user satisfaction by giving them early access to new features. It’s expected to foster a deeper engagement with our products and provide valuable feedback that can be used to refine our offerings. Moreover, this initiative will likely strengthen community ties as users become active participants in our product development cycle.
Currently, we are in an exciting phase, awaiting additional engineering resources to proceed. The successful implementation of this tool could significantly impact our business by enhancing user retention, attracting new customers, and ultimately boosting revenue through accelerated product innovation.
Conclusion
While we highlighted the winning teams in this 2023 recap, we also want to recognize all the other participating teams that came together to compete in Hack Day last year. It’s not easy getting up in front of your peers to present an idea you’re well-versed in, let alone a new concept in a short window of time with a team you may have just met. With our next Hack Day on the horizon, we at ThousandEyes can’t wait to see what new and exciting projects are in store.
Want to be a part of the fun for next year? ThousandEyes is hiring! Please see our Careers page for open roles.
