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Photo credit: Nick Korte / VMware

This week, Nick Korte can be found at VMworld in Las Vegas. In this account, he describes how joining the VMworld hackathon can be a great way to pick up new skills, advance your career, meet new people, and build a community around tech.

LAS VEGAS — If you didn’t know any better, you might think a hackathon is an attempt to break through a security hole in some sort of software or hardware device, but in the case of VMworld, the VMware {code} hackathon is an experience in team-building, coding, and automation.

Shortly after registering for VMworld a couple of months ago, I found out about the hackathon through this blog post. And if I were not following most of the VMware channels on Twitter, I’m not sure I would have known about it at all.

At first, I had kind of dismissed the idea of joining a team because I was not sure I could be an active contributor — until I learned that you don’t even need to know how to code. VMworld had slots for 15 teams, and only a couple of teams had formed. The idea was to automate something, and it didn’t even have to include VMware products. I told myself I would think about it.

Around the same time I encountered that blog post, I was deploying a Hytrust Keycontrol cluster for use with vSphere’s VM Encryption. And when I ran into issues backing up the Hytrust cluster, I had to write some code utilizing the Hytrust APIs. (You can find the full writeup on that here.)

A team is formed

Every hackathon team starts with an idea. Since the Hytrust deployment and the vCenter configuration to register a KMS were pretty manual, I wondered if this could be automated using the Hytrust and vSphere APIs so that a vSphere administrator could just start using VM Encryption without needing to learn how to deploy and connect the KMS. Since I am not a developer by trade, I wanted someone to vet my idea. Alan Renouf (Product Manager of vSphere APIs) was kind enough to take a look at my idea and encouraged me to form a team. I signed up using the Google Sheet, and Defenders of the Keystore was born!

People started joining my team one at a time, and before I knew it, we had a solid team of 6 people. The team consisted of two VMware Systems Engineers, a Product Manager from Veeam, two pretty advanced coders in the infrastructure engineering space, and me (just a mere sysadmin). Preparing for the event

As the event approached, we communicated via the VMware Code Slack channel to expand upon the initial idea, each member adding his own take on what our deliverable product should be. At one point we even talked about putting one of the two Hytrust nodes in AWS and kicking off the workflow using an IoT button.

Alan Renouf and William Lam were on a couple of different podcasts in the weeks leading up to the hackathon to talk about more of the specifics of the environment each team would be using, the prizes, the diverse teams and technologies covered, and a bit about where the idea for a hackathon formed. Check out the VMware Community Roundtable Podcast # 400 and the Virtually Speaking Podcast # 55 to hear more on these topics.  Additionally, we learned about the special guest judges and were given a final logistics update just days before the hackathon.

This year they offered training classes for various languages right before the hackathon. A couple of members of the team and I attended the Python class. Since I had never used Python before, it was very helpful. You can use the vSphere SDK for Python (free download) to make API calls against a vCenter 6.5 instance to get information about your datacenter or perform various operations in an automated fashion.

Our team had a couple of in-person strategic meetings before the hackathon to narrow the scope of our team task in an effort to make sure we would finish and so each team member knew his individual responsibilities. Even though the hackathon is slated for 4 hours, we got 2.5 hours of actual coding time. The end goal became to encrypt 2 virtual machines. To do that, we would have to deploy a 2-node Hytrust cluster, register with vCenter, turn on encryption for 2 VMs we created, and power them on.  Could it be done?  We certainly thought so.

Let the hacking begin!

The event began promptly at 8 p.m. Each team was given an information sheet with the environment details (one vCenter for each team with three hosts and a vSAN datastore and team access to a management vCenter with a content library containing ISOs and OVFs).  Each team would be scored by the judges using the following criteria — creativity, usefulness, team collaboration, fun/learning, and presentation. And the judges would be coming around to each team’s table to observe and interact with team members throughout the hackathon. At the end of the 2.5 hours, members of each team would get 90 seconds to present before the judges on their chosen project and progress made.

Once they said "Go," at first every team ran into problems connecting to and staying on the WiFi.  That was completely frustrating to the point where members of our team had to at times go and use a wired connection to the core switch for the hackathon infrastructure to transfer data. Many people in the room turned on their mobile hotspots and connected to home labs or servers at some other location so progress could continue.

We spent a good deal of time just getting the ISOs uploaded into our lab datastore so we could deploy VMs to encrypt. But we were not alone. Everyone had infrastructure challenges.  We anticipated we would run into problems but certainly not problems of this specific kind.

When coding time was up, each team gave their 90 second presentation to the judges and wished for the best. It was very cool to see the progress other teams made (things like solutions wrapped in Clarity UI, some using open source products to check a VMware configuration for security, some trying to make existing products work faster, etc.). And even though it was not planned, the 15 teams’ projects covered an array of different technologies.

In the end, there can be only one winner, and it went to Ops Ninjas. Our team came in third and was a judge’s honorable mention based on our idea and approach. In summary

In the end, I feel like each member of our team learned something new and contributed something to our overall goal. We had a good time, and it was great getting to know new people that I plan to stay in contact with long after the hackathon. And it does not stop here — our plan is to post the code on GitHub so others can benefit from our progress, and we hope to continue our work on this moving forward.

Along the way we collectively discovered Hytrust’s APIs falling short of allowing complete automation of deployment, and we plan to communicate those to Hytrust in hopes to improve their product.

Looking back on this experience, would I do it again? I absolutely would. In fact, I really have an itch to write more code and automate something else. If I’m blessed to return to VMworld next year, the hackathon will be on my list of things not to miss.

Career takeaway: When given the opportunity, jump in with both feet and take risks to get outside your comfort zone. Approach every situation from the perspective that you have something to learn from it.

Edited Aug 30, 2017 at 7:30 UTC
Popular Topics in Features nancyneal Aug 30, 2017 at 8:10 UTC

That sounds like a lot of fun
 
Ricardo272 Aug 30, 2017 at 8:26 UTC

I will use all the time as my motto. Thanks for this write up.
 
Kirsten (Veeam) Aug 30, 2017 at 8:37 UTC

Brand Representative for Veeam Software

Hey! I know that guy! ( points at Michael White**)
 Marc1692 Aug 30, 2017 at 9:31 UTC

Thanks for the write up.  I feel your pain setting up events that involve wifi connections.  At my work, just getting a bunch of Foremen together to install an iPhone app is a nightmare of all day proportions.  Hotels just aren't setup for this kind of thing.  In your case, "Thumbdrives and Hardlinks for Everyone!"  would have been my motto.  I hope the next event goes more smoothly.