Saddle up for a Hackathon hoedown, friends! At WP Engine, our Hackathons are two-day innovation rodeos where teams work together to create new product ideas or solve existing problems.
The event is not just about software. Participants can choose any project related to their daily work or a new area of interest, including making physical objects. It’s also a great opportunity for employees to work with people they might not otherwise work with, fostering new connections and cross-team learning.
This time, we ventured into the American Old West—horses, flannels, jeans, spurs, cowboy hats, lassos, and—why not?—cats for the memes!
While the projects that emerge from the Hackathon don’t always turn into future WP Engine innovations, they often directly impact the lives of our customers and colleagues through experimentation and learning.
Hold on to your hats. there’s more to this rodeo!
Embracing the spirit of friendly competition and community impact, WP Engine Hackathons come with an optional contest where winners can pay it forward by contributing to a charity of their choice.
Now, let’s tip our hats to the heart of the event—the awards! There are six prizes in total. This includes five popular choice awards that any WP Engine employee can vote for, as well as a special award sponsored by an Executive Sponsor.
Our awards this year were as follows:
The Lone Can Award
The Lone Can Award celebrates the team that, while not making it to the finish line, gave a glimpse of what could have been. Like a can of beans, this project is nutritious, but not quite a complete meal.
We embrace experimentation at every WP Engine Hackathon, understanding that ventures into uncharted territory can face challenges and even failures. The establishment of this award for projects facing such obstacles aims to inspire teams to share their experiences, promoting a culture of learning and growth for all.
Pardner First
The Pardner First Award honors the team that skillfully combines innovation with customer needs, creating a solution as comforting as an old friend and as reliable as a worn pair of boots.
Rooted in WP Engine’s Core Value of Customer Inspired, this award recognizes projects that embody a deep understanding and commitment to our customers.
Tighten the Bootstraps
The Tighten the Bootstraps award recognizes a group’s wisdom in deciding when to mend a fence instead of building a new one.
For an Engineer, creating new things is exciting, but this award recognizes the value of improving what we already have. This award is a nod to teams that innovate within established institutions.
The brightest buckle in town
For the Shiniest Buckle in Town award, a team’s work must be more than just functional. It must be a masterpiece, a well-crafted piece of code that stands tall at the edge of software.
Just as a cowboy takes pride in his belt buckle, this team can proudly wear the shiniest buckle in town to symbolize meticulous attention to detail and design finesse. This award is heavily inspired by another WP Engine Core Value: Design Matters.
The Platinum Prospectors Award
We always want an award that allows teams to compete for a “top spot” in the competition.
The Platinum Prospectors Award is given to the project that hits all the right notes, leaving an indelible mark on the Wild West of code. Their innovation and execution resonate with brilliance and leave a lasting impact.
AI Code Wrangler Award by Girish Byraiah
Each Hackathon has a special prize awarded by an Executive Sponsor. The sponsor of this Hackathon, WP Engine VP of Engineering, Girish Byraiah, challenged the teams to boldly cross the digital grasslands, breaking new ground in the wild terrain of artificial intelligence.
This award recognizes the bold innovators who emerged as the diehards of our Old West Hackathon.
Nineteen teams presented their projects at the end of the Hackathon. Their 48-hour junk projects are remembered from their presentations, representing an imagined future state of what WP Engine could be.
These are some of the award-winning projects we’ve made together.
Hack for Cats: The Lone Can Award
Starting with an innovation, two adventurous hackers, Christine Seaman and Courtney Sims, set out to improve the lives of their feline friends.
This team developed interactive games, toys, and even a new cat authentication device so that our friends could more easily log into our computers late at night and chat with their friends about world domination!
As a nod to their creativity, the team donated their profits to Alley Cat Allies, a non-profit working to improve the lives of all cats and kittens.
Cowboy Quest: Pardner First
A pair of budding hackers, Byanca De La Fuente and Daniel Urdialez, have found success with their creation: Search Cowboy, a powerful internal search tool.
Their mission? To enhance the customer experience by highlighting relevant information from multiple internal knowledge sources such as Jira and Guru, empowering our award-winning support teams with the information they need at lightning speed. If the data is out there, Search Cowboy will help us gather it.
For their customer-inspired win, the team donated their winnings to Latino Outdoors, an organization dedicated to building a world where all Latino communities enjoy nature as a safe and inclusive place.
GoQueue: Tighten the Bootstraps
This team breathed new life into a five-year hackathon project to replace our old traffic queue system. Responsible for routing billions of daily requests, this system allows WP Engine’s WordPress platform to fairly distribute computing resources as site traffic fluctuates.
The goal was clear: to achieve performance parity with the existing standby system. Not only did this project show promising results, but it also implemented a new weighted fair queuing algorithm in Golang.
In recognition of their achievement, team members Eric Miller, Daniel Ayvar, Alexander Wilcots, William McKinnerney, Wyatt Tall and Nate Gay chose to pay it forward by donating their winnings to Fund Texas Choice, a non-profit organization that provides Texans with access to abortion health care.
Cowboys of the Dark: Shiniest Buckle in Town
In response to customer feedback like “My retinas are on fire,” this team opened up the world of CSS, Material UI, Typescript, React, Ruby, and just a hint of Sass to create the WP Engine User Portal: Dark Mode.
Thanks to their efforts, relief for our eyes may soon be on the horizon. All credit goes to these talented team members: Adam Kostuch, Adam Łapiński, Alex Butler, Donagh Kelleher, Marwa Saad, Robin Olaya, Ryszard Borzych, Sarah Ricker, Teresa Gobble and Tyson Reeder.
To celebrate their new pin, the team donated their profits to the Kessler Foundation, which leads life-changing rehabilitation research for people with disabilities.
The Data Desperados: The Platinum Prospectors Prize
For this Hack, Justin Reasoner, Ty Christensen and Ian Meron created a new database layer for the WordPress hosting platform.
The goal was to separate some of our state workloads from our traditional hosting stack. This team exceeded their initial goal and created a highly available Kubernetes service that would be easier to manage than our existing database solution.
The impact of this project on the future of hosting on WP Engine cannot be overstated, which is why it won The Platinum Prospectors Award. The team donated their profits to Feeding America, helping to fight hunger.
ChatWPYee-Haw: AI Code Wrangler Award by Girish Byraiah
This team demonstrated the underlying technologies that WP Engine could use to create a smart assistant for internal use. Leveraging Google’s Vertex AI Search, this team created a generative AI language model that integrates with Slack.
Their creation delivered a stellar interactive demo, providing the best cowboy events this side of the Mississippi. This project opens the door to future models trained on internal knowledge sources similar to those used by the Search Cowboy project.
Ben Turner, Drew Holt, Eric Haase, Eric Hoanshelt, Justin Lim, Mehar Gangishetti, Parul Priya, Peter Nuernberg, Ramya Iyer, Silver Bowen and Spencer Putnam donated their winnings to Doctors Without Borders, which provides emergency medical aid worldwide.
The spirit of innovation and collaboration we saw during the Old West Hackathon is something we carry with us every day at WP Engine. Our commitment extends to fostering an environment where employees are empowered to explore new ideas and take risks. Belief in this ethos drives our continuous innovation and growth.
Have you participated in other exciting Hackathons? Share your experiences with us in the comments!
If you want to prepare for our next Hackathon, WP Engine welcomes passionate people to join our Engineering teams. Exciting opportunities await you, including the recent announcement of 20 new jobs in our award-winning Limerick office.
For more details, visit our careers page.
