Whether you’re a college student or a seasoned professional, opportunities to learn new skills and explore new, cutting-edge tech are few and far in between. One of the tech industry’s most solid tools for fostering innovation and collaboration continues to be the hackathon.
What is a hackathon, you ask? Well, you can think of it as similar to a “sprint”, in agile development practices. In a hackathon, you and a few teammates will spend a predetermined amount of time designing, coding and deploying a solution that matches the theme or goal of the hackathon.
Here at Chef, we’re DevOps people. DevOps has evolved over the past few years from being just an alternative approach to deploying your infrastructure, to now being a mainstream approach across all industries. Enterprises, startups, and individuals all love using DevOps practices to simplify their existing workflows and reach peak efficiency.
We want to spread the word about Chef’s ecosystem of products to as many people as possible. We want you to experience first-hand the speed, ease, and versatility of policy as code. Don’t just take our word for it, sign up for the hackathon now to see how easy it is to automate toil with Chef.
Here are five reasons why you shouldn’t miss Chef’s “Automate for Good” hackathon:
1. Train for a real-world development environment
It’s about time you stepped outside your comfort zone, don’t you think? It can be very scary to navigate uncharted territory, but we’ve curated a space where you can feel comfortable learning and growing within the Chef ecosystem. To win at the “Automate for Good” hackathon, you need to push yourself and take calculated risks. We’ll help you with the tools you need and experts to guide you through, but the secret sauce is you.
2. Make new friends and connections
The hackathon is not only a competition, it’s a fantastic opportunity to meet new people. You’ll compete against and collaborate with hundreds of talented developers, so winning won’t be a small feat. Our goal is to challenge participants to innovate and create compelling solutions to real problems using Chef. Most importantly though, this is a unique learning experience that will push you to grow your network, develop new skills, and ship great ideas.
3. Showcase your talent
If you’re looking for a portfolio building opportunity, look no further. The “Automate for Good” hackathon is not only a place to collaborate with fellow devs, but also an incredible opportunity to highlight your talent and establish yourself as a rising expert. Employers love to see you being proactive with learning and applying new skills and while collaborating with teammates. That’s exactly what you’ll be doing in the hackathon, plus you can add your project to your portfolio and call out participation on your resume. Prepare yourself for the recognition and new career opportunities that will come from participating, and ultimately winning the hackathon.
4. Make an impact
This hackathon invites you to showcase the power of DevOps to the world and make the world a better place while doing it. This challenge is your chance to exhibit your work in the DevOps ecosystem that is positively impacting our world. You can go a step ahead and create new and innovative solutions to improve our lives, too. Either way, you will be making an impact which is the ultimate goal anyway, right?
5. Win cool awards and prizes
We’re 100% invested in our community, and in building solutions that push us all to do (and be) better. That’s why this hackathon has some fantastic prizes in store for the winners. But that’s not all; everyone participating will stand a chance to win some slick Chef swag!
- 1st prize: $15,000 USD
- 2nd prize: $10,000 USD
- 3rd prize: $5,000 USD
- 2 teams with the best implementation win an iPad Pro
- 4 teams with the most promising idea win PS5
Plus, each team that submits an eligible project will win exclusive swag to include stickers, a t-shirt for each participant, and a Badgr badge!
Hurry, submissions close on October 25th so there are only a few short weeks left to participate. You really don’t want to miss this free opportunity to challenge yourself to build something epic and win great prizes. If you’re a noob, and you’re wondering “what’s Chef and who’s Ruby?” then you should head over to learn.chef.io for free training courses and a quick start guide!
Questions? Ask us anything at chef-community@progress.com or in the #hackathon channel on Slack.