Okta Innovation: Smart APIs, Rolling Robots and “No Phish” at Our Quarterly Hackathon

At Okta, we’re “always on” in every sense of the phrase, from our focus on customers to our products, service and innovation. If you stopped by our HQ last week, you likely saw that philosophy in full force.

During our quarterly hackathon, our engineers rolled up their sleeves to build clever new projects that go beyond our everyday responsibilities, whether to enhance Okta’s core platform service or create a new feature that helps us better serve our thousands of customers.

Fueled by a delicious breakfast and with an eye toward the grand prize (Ollie robots!), our employees were ready to start hacking.

And hack they did. Similar to previous Okta Hackathons, each team explored a product-focused innovation (building on existing functionality or introducing something entirely new) or an engineering-focused hack (improving internal processes among developer, test and operations teams). We gave out first- and second-place prizes within each, along with awards for two additional categories: “Most Creative” and “Fresh Blood.”

Check out the highlights – and help us congratulate the winners – from our 72-hour event:

Product Category

Winner: “(G)No (F)Phish” by Nate, Reman, Taylor and Ujjwal

Phishing is tricky to reliably detect, so the “No Phish” team used the Okta browser plugin to identify potential phishing attempts and send an alert to the user.

Runner-Up: “Webhooks API” by Karl, Rahul, Ray and Trevor

This team built a simple webhooks API to support push notifications based on events in the system.

Engineering Category

Winner: “Smart API” by Balaji and Vinoth

Less is more. Recognising the power of choice, the “Smart API” team built a framework that lets developers express interest in a subset of a particular API output and filter out the rest. We’re excited to announce that, as a top voted hackathon idea in the engineering category, the team will dedicate two weeks toward making this a reality on the Okta platform.

Runner-Up: “SET Power” by Jeff B, Jimmy, Madhavi, Naveen and Wendy

Building on our Splunk logging implementation, this team enabled the ability to track of previously reported exceptions and mark them as known issues, or “ignorables.”

Most Creative

Winner: “Visualizing Okta Taxonomy” by Felix and Nicholas

Fresh Blood

Winner: “Cross-Org Method Report” by Amogh, Brian, Meghna and Yuming

We added the “Fresh Blood” prize category at our May hackathon. As you can probably guess by its name, this award recognises new engineering team members for showing innovation early in their journey at Okta.

In the spirit of true collaboration and productivity, engineers Amogh, Brian and Okta Hackathon first timers Meghna and Yuming set out to solve issues that inevitably arise in any multi-tenant environment. Their hack proposes an enhancement to our code build process that annotates and reports on potentially dangerous cross-org methods.

After three days of nonstop innovation – with treats, stickers and a happy hour thrown in the mix – we might be physically exhausted, but are energised by new product ideas and incredible ways of thinking.

Interested in learning more about innovation at Okta, or want to show off your own coding prowess at our next hackathon? Check out all open positions on our careers page.