This 12 months’s Cisco Enterprise Networking Hackathon, held globally on October 11-12, was one other big success. The Hackathon has grown steadily over time as a result of it’s enjoyable, thrilling, artistic, and collaborative. This 12 months, engineers took the occasion tagline “Hackers Assemble!” to coronary heart and turned out in report numbers. Participation within the Hackathon has gone from 275 contributors in 2015 to this 12 months’s 1637 contributors from 17 completely different international locations, together with 37 college students from 23 universities globally. Last 12 months, the Hackathon was 100% digital; this 12 months over half of the contributors on 450 groups have been onsite at Cisco workplaces within the United States, India, Canada, Switzerland, and China.
Theme and Tracks
Project concepts for the Hackathon, which was formally introduced in August by Ravi Chandra, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Networking at Cisco, started percolating for weeks earlier than the occasion. The theme this 12 months was “Multi-domain and Open Systems” and engineers labored on quite a lot of ideas below 5 tracks (Figure 1).
Project groups of two to 6 engineers collaborated beginning at 10:00 AM on Day 1. There was meals, snacks, t-shirts, trivia contests, raffles, and a way of pleasure within the air. On Day 2, every group offered their concepts to judges with slides and a pre-recorded video. During the Hackathon, contributors might stroll across the cubicles inside their places and see different initiatives.
Winner Spotlights
Software Engineer Josh Hampton, who works in San Jose on the SD-WAN product, joined a group engaged on a reporting dashboard for a lab-as-a-service (LaaS) idea. Testers don’t use devoted tools for testing on a regular basis. With LaaS, they reserve the time they should use the tools, decreasing testing sources wanted and power used.
For the hackathon, his group created a brand new LaaS dashboard that exhibits which people are utilizing which sources and particulars of their use for higher useful resource planning.
Working collaboratively and intensively on the Hackathon, “People came up with questions that I hadn’t thought of originally,” stated Hampton. “We came up with new ideas. The development went faster and smoother than if we were collaborating on it once a week.”
Mingyi Huang, Software Engineer on the Cisco IOS XE group specializing in reliable programs, was on a successful group of two on the Hackathon. “We had the idea to bring Security Enhanced Linux, a policy control access mechanism, to IOS XE.” Developers can paste SE Linux denial of service messages into the software, and it generates coverage to supply entry to different software program processes on a router or swap.
Participating within the Hackathon in Bengaluru, Test Development Engineer on the SD-WAN group Rishab Jain discovered the time strain of the occasion exhilarating. “You have to be a little aggressive. You have to run fast. You may need to be on call all day.” His group’s successful concept was a dashboard for an analytics answer known as Third Eye. The software gathers crucial information from regression testing actions of particular person engineers and offers insights into how testers and groups are performing. Prior to the Hackathon, the group collaborated with others inside Cisco Enterprise Networking to combine related regression testing information. During the Hackathon, they began constructing the dashboard and a video and slide deck to current to the judges.
The software now offers 60 to 70 engineers on the SD-WAN regression testing group with suggestions on their relative effectivity. “We used to take 24 days to run 30,000 test cases. Gathering this data was a manual process. After Third Eye, we are able to close an 80,000-test cycle in 15-20 days. Our goal is seven days.”
Also based mostly in India, Premalatha A V, Technical Lead on the Catalyst 9600/9600x DevTest platform group, is now a two-time Hackathon winner. This 12 months, her group built-in QR codes on gadget consoles with hyperlinks to particular documentation. “Let’s say a customer wants to implement ISSU, to know what upgrade is supported. The QR code links to that particular documentation web page. Customers can scan the QR code using a handheld device, like a phone.” She credit the innovation with decreasing TAC circumstances and offering rapid solutions to gadget questions.
Software engineer Andrew Castelino is a brand new school recruit and has been at Cisco for simply three months, based mostly in San Jose. The group he joined labored on a sensible whiteboarding software known as ConfabAir which was one of many Hackathon award winners. “You turn on your camera and make gestures with your hands in the air and the tool draws as if you’re using a pen on an actual whiteboard,” he stated. The know-how makes use of laptop imaginative and prescient and a neural community, and the demo featured peer-to-peer connections. “The tracking was a little shaky, but I did some interpolation to make it smoother.” Others on the group labored on networking, neural community, and net interface. “It was really fun,” stated Castelino. “People saw us drawing in the air and gathered around us. I got a chance to meet with leaders in Enterprise Networking as well.”
Ben Astell, a developer on the Python Automated Test Systems group based mostly in Canada, joined Hackathon groups working within the cafeteria on the Ottawa workplace. His group’s successful innovation was a CLI to YANG translation software utilizing machine studying for a extra automated method to integration testing. “At the Hackathon, we implemented how the data can be collected during test runs, the shim layer, and a proof-of-concept of the data modeler.” His group is happy in regards to the potential for the answer to ultimately be accessible to builders all over the place.
San Jose State University scholar Chaoron Lei was assigned to a group engaged on optimizing the message path in Catalyst 9000. He helped report assembly discussions, labored on the presentation slides, and requested a whole lot of questions in preparation for the judging. “It was a totally new experience for me,” he stated. “Even though the engineers are busy with their regular jobs, they had the passion to work on a competition for two days. They really love this industry.”
The Patentathon and Beyond
For some Hackathon winners, the journey continues.
According to Sarang Samant, co-lead with Amit Nandy for the 2022 EN Hackathon, “Winning ideas from the Hackathon, along with a list of other ideas that are highlighted by the tech sponsors and judges as potentially good ideas, are shortlisted. Then a core team of principal engineers and distinguished engineers across all PINs in EN work with the teams to identify which ideas can be patented. Finally, in the Patentathon, teams are guided through the patent filing process.”
Additionally, a bunch of Hackathon winners will likely be provided funding by means of the CTO’s workplace to pursue their concepts as their new day job.
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