Our First Hackathon Projects Have Graduated to Production!

In early 2016, we decided to launch our first Hackathon, reIMAGINE.

The rules of the event were simple:

• Assemble a team
• Rally around an idea
• Build a prototype of a solution that can benefit our customers (internal or external)
• It must solve a business problem

The teams had three days to pick members from all departments (engineering, ops, customer service, sales, etc.), build a prototype, and create a presentation. Each presentation would include topics like problem solved, solution, working demo, what’s left to build, challenges faced, and lesson learned.

The results were outstanding; beyond any expectations! Three winning teams were picked and awarded with extra stock options and a gift. Their projects, which are outlined below, are now live.

1st Place Team: Chartastic Bring your own Visualization (BYOV)

We at Catchpoint believe in the power of data, visualizations, and charting to help our customers detect, identify, and fix problems faster while turning data into actionable information. So, how do we make this even better?

The concept behind Chartastic is to allow customers to either use third-party charting libraries (D3JS, Dygraph, etc.), or to write their own libraries and use them within Catchpoint to create new stunning charts and visualizations. Making the data we collect on their behalf even more useful and tailored to their needs.

Some examples:

Performance by City

Geo Heatmap

Performance Radar by City

Scatter Plot Matrix

2nd Place Team: Going Big by Going Small

Catchpoint runs on the newest and most powerful hardware, from our nodes to our Orchestra backend servers. But, in certain situations we are asked to put our Agents in “interesting” locations and this is where we have been working on shrinking our nodes.

The goal of this project was to port our OnPrem agent to the Raspberry platform (Not yet in production). Now that the latest Raspberry has more power this is going to be very interesting.

OnPrem Hardware Evolution

3rd Place Team: MouseTrap

Catchpoint was designed to make people more productive, from the collaborative features baked

into its core functionality to its intuitive, easy-to-use interface. Our users, from Ops, Eng, Devops and SRE to Marketing operations have their hands full, making sure their applications and services are running 24/7. How can we make them more productive?

The Mouse Trap project ended up bringing a Console / CLI and Shortcuts to the Catchpoint Portal to make it even more easier and responsive for our power users.

Console with CLI

Shortcuts

After the huge success of the January 2016 Hackaton, we decided to do another one which just ended in late July 2016. This time we had 12 teams competing and I cannot wait to share with you and our customers some of the incredible solutions our teams are going to bring to the table!

I also RE-learned an incredible lesson as the CEO: As any company grows, having more employees, more customers, and more challenges, we tend to not think as a startup anymore. Losing that mindset is not healthy for a company. Empowering the creativity and ingenuity of our employees is a core pillar of any startup, and I will never let go of that again.

Thank you Hackathon Class of January 2016!

Mehdi