My First Hackathon - Back to Dev Process
Other than participating in a middle school “lock-in” where we spent the night playing Dinopark Tycoon, I have not really participated in any true hackathons dedicating yourself to another project. Been pretty fortunate that my employer sponsored a hackathon this year. Since a large part of my team is remote, we found budget to bring folks into our San Francisco HQ. Ironically this is my first time in HQ and have been drinking non-stop all of the free Hint Water that we have available!
Team Manatron, Unite!
We merged two teams for the hackathon. Team Manatee which was my team and Team Voltron which was another team merged to form you guessed it, Team Manatron! We are working on an automated DevSecOps tooling. After the hackathon, we plan to roll our tooling out company wide. I am fortunate that I spent time at a DevSecOps firm before so pretty familiar with open source and commercial tools thus was quickly valued by the team.
You like JAVA right?
My initial part of the team was to create a purpose built JAVA App to include insecure libraries. Simple enough I can go to get OWASP's WebGoat and be done early and crush more Hint Water. Well we had a few other requirements. Since my firm is pretty big into Gradle, we decided we needed to intercept at the Gradle level. Not wanting to convert WebGoat into a Gradle project, decided to write my own JAVA project.
Cobwebs be Gone!
Most of my day to day hands on keyboard responsibility ended around 2013 when I became an architect. From then on, most of what I have written were modifying demos and scaffolding code or automation / integration scripts. Lately I have felt more like a YAML Engineer working on platforms like Kubernetes and DC/OS. Decided to create a Spring Boot Gradle Project similar to the one on Spring’s documentation. I was able to get my Minimal Viable Product (MVP) done. The part that was missing for me was needing to integrate this with our company’s dev and release processes. Has been some time since I was on a true engineering team. I am well versed in SCM and dependency management, but outside of GitHub for personal projects (e.g I am the only contributor) had some learning to do.
Not Leaving Eclipse, a refresher in GIT.
There were three of us working on Team Manatron. The purview I have now is that we are on at Atlasssian Stack with Bitbucket being our hosted repository (GIT) . Most of my learning during the hackathon came around using GIT with more than one person. Feels like I am back on a software engineering team. I was fumbling around a little with the GIT command line and finally got GIT setup in Eclipse. Since we use SSH Keys, found this easy video to get Eclipse’s GIT Client talking to our BitBucket instance in no time. Some GIT commands that are helpful to brush up on:
Rebase
Commit
Push
Pull
Merge
Stash
The other concept that was not totally clear to me was what really a Pull Request (PR) could be used for. After some learning, a Pull Request is a code review and notification mechanism. Since a PR is also notification mechanism, there is a wide brush of what can be accomplished once a system or users are notified. In our case, we used GitHooks extensively. My first time writing one instead of just configuring software to listen. Awesome!
When is the next Hackathon?!
I really enjoyed working with my hackathon team. I worked with folks from the company that I would never get to interface with and glad for the opportunity to spend some time out at HQ and learning from the greater team. My firm invested heavily in actives and food to keep our stomachs and minds refreshed during the hackathon, certainly a high bar. Team Manatron is wrapping up our pitch deck ready to start the journey to implement our DevSecOps improvement company wide!
