Okta Q1 Hackathon: Engineers Push Seamless Processes

When we flip the page on our calendar at Okta and begin a new quarter, our engineers know it’s time to get creative! Our engineering hackathons bring friendly competition, collaboration and best of all, improvements for our customers and our own internal infrastructure. The hackathon couldn’t have come at a better time after all of our engineers just gathered for an inspirational 2016 Engineering Kick-Off earlier this month.

As with each of our previous hackathons, engineers are encouraged to team-up to create products, improve existing functionality on current products or improve our operations to help with workflows and internal processes. All in all, everyone at Okta enjoys the break from day-to-day work and the opportunity to tap one of our core Okta values – innovation. We’re all innovators here at Okta and these hackathons are proof that the innovation never stops!

In March, we had 9 hacks presented in the engineering category, and 4 hacks in the product category. In addition to a winner for both engineering and product, we also awarded a winner for most creative and “fresh blood”-- best hack from teams with at least one new team member.

Check out the highlights from this quarter’s hackathon, hosted last week.

Engineering Category:
Winner: Cancel CI Run, CI Feedback (Ajinkya Suryawanshi, Kelsey Abe, Lars Johansen, Royal Chan)
The CI team’s goal was to come up with a way to enable developers to cancel “garbage” runs on bacon to save cost and resources. As they say, time is money and this team was looking to save a bit of both.

Runner-Up: The HULK (Vinoth Jayaraman, Balaji Sundaram, Peter Yaworsky, Unmesh Vartak)
The HULK project focused on leveraging existing technologies and frameworks to improve the efficiency of Okta’s internal user update workflow. The team pursued leveraging Redis to significantly speed up the processing of these user updates.

Product Category:
Winner: Just Push It (Yuming Cao, Naveen Keerthy)
Just Push It is seeking to make customers’ lives more seamless by minimizing the manual process during login via Okta Verify and MFA. A smoother process is delightful for both customers and end users.

Runner-Up: SU Feature UI Improvements (Heidi Slater, Brian Zuzga, Gregory, Mau Silva)
This team asked the question to internal super users, “How much time have you wasted clicking through each tab using ⌘F?” SU Feature UI Improvements looked to add search, show associated editions/SKUs and more.

Most Creative: Fast Auth (Magizh Thirunavukkarasu, Deen Ma, Gautham Gowrishankar)
Fast Auth is a quick and secure way to identify a user when contacting your local IT or customer support representative. This team is working to put an end to the days of spelling out names and giving out the last 4 digits of a SSN.

Fresh Blood: Okta Job Insight (Prakash Killada, Jenny Kazarina, Mahesh Raju)
Okta Job Insight’s goal is to leverage the job table info in Okta’s DWH for improved access to job performance analysis and reports on trends. The more insight, the better.

If you are interested in driving the innovation happening at Okta or are looking to step into the ring at our next hackathon, head to our careers page to see all of the open positions!