 Hi Red Hat developers. This is Jason with the Red Hat developers program. Welcome back to the DevZone at Summit 2017. Today with us we have Nicholas Grenier from 3Scale by Red Hat and he's going to show us to talk to us about revolutionizing hackathons at today's Code Starter. So really glad to be here. It's my first summit and as Jason said I'm part of 3Scale. We've been in the Red Hat family for just a year. So today we're going to talk about the different hackathons and specifically something that's happening tonight, the Code Starter. So I'm Nicholas Grenier. I'm a developer advocate, developer evangelist at 3Scale. You can find me on the different social media through my username and as we're developers you can find me on github as well with the same username. And I work for 3Scale. So 3Scale I'm sure you've seen it this morning. We do API management and we have announced a bunch of stuff today through on-premise and containerization. So if you do stuff with APIs you could be really interested. By a sense we are all hackers. The whole developer community around here and in our company we love hackathons. We love doing stuff with APIs through our own APIs through people APIs, our clients APIs. So we've been to a ton of other events. We've run few events. This is one of our spring hack. It was our internal hackathon. But it's a typical hackathon, right? It's an open subject. People come with ideas of what they want to hack on. As this one was internal we're encouraged to do stuff with the product and try to find extension, trying to find an interesting use case for the business. But you're used to this format. So usually it takes two days. There's a sense of competition. You don't really limit what you have to do with it. So there are no specific guidelines. You don't know what you're going to get from it as a hacker. You don't know what you should expect to learn, what you're going to expect to achieve. And also there's something that could be annoying if you go to hackathon is the unfair judging. So I may do an awesome app on mobile. But if the judge panel is not really interested by mobile, they're more into the AI stuff. Although you've built a great thing, you might not have a chance to win this. And as you're a sponsor, when you're a sponsor and a few companies here might be interested to sponsor this type of competition, you're not guaranteed that your brain will be visible. So you're not guaranteed that people will try your API. They're not guaranteed that they will give you feedback on the tool. So we decided to come up with a new format called Speedhack. So that's a format that came three, four years ago. And we decided to put that for our partners at our API conference, the API Strategy Conference. The idea was to do a hackathon on steroids, meaning that on a limited amount of time, people will be able to discover a bunch of APIs through a bunch of puzzles and challenges. So it benefits both the attendees and the sponsors. Also it benefits a conference because before, if you wanted to do a classical hackathon, you will ask people to come maybe two days before the conference, which is usually super hard. And if you do it during the conference, people will miss the interesting topic, the interesting content they came for. So instead, we decided to take it short, just a three-hour period of time, and having different challenges. So we did six to eight challenges. They should take 15 minutes each. And the team that solves most of the challenges win points and get a win award. There is a sense of real-time competition because during the event, we had a leaderboard. And so as you were progressing to the challenges, you were getting up in the leaderboard and you were able to get points. And so there was a sense of urgency of like, we had to get better than the other team. And for the sponsors, you were guaranteed that your API will be tried by hackers and they will stop at your table asking for feedback. And so you had a better engagement with the developer community. We've done it three times at different places, Chicago, Berlin, and Paris. This is an open format, so we'll be happy to do that in other places. And we worked with a bunch of different sponsors, with a bunch of different APIs doing crazy things. And people have come up with crazy challenges. So the Twilio guys, for example, they did a game where it was entering random numbers and calling random numbers, super fun stuff. So a bunch of fun and a lot of learning from the developer perspective. But we can still innovate on the format for hackathons. There's still a big room to come with something new, get people engaged, get people excited, and provide a fun experience. And you will see that through what's going on right now in the hackathon scene. So people will just say, OK, the only way to innovate will be changing the space where we're doing this. So people will say, OK, we should do a hackathon on a plane, which is fun. We should do a hackathon on a bus, which is also fun on a train. I've done bus and train so far, missing the plane. But it's still the same format. You still spend a limited amount of time in a small space. And you don't have real guidance. And again, you don't know what you're going to learn from it. So instead, we decided to try to do something better. And that's going to be for you tonight at a world premiere. As we announced on the developer blog before the conference, we're going to do tonight at Red Hat Summit, 6 PM, room 210A. A bunch of magic going around. So imagine a really nice trailer. We're going to launch and do the first API escape room. And while I'm talking, I have two colleagues actually play testing the game, making sure the game works. And actually, it seems harder than we thought. But I'm sure you're going to have a lot of friends. We have three hours to solve the escape room. If you're not familiar with the escape room, it's usually a physical game, a physical puzzle. So you get close into a room and your goal is to escape with your team. And you're going to try to get all the clues that are around you. You're going to open the books. You're going to turn on the lights. You're going to find a locker. You're going to tear down the whole room to find clues and make progress. We're going to do the same thing. But as we're API people, as we're developers, we're going to put some API in it. And I'm not going to spoil you the whole game, but come later tonight and you will get a chance to see it. We're going to have food as well and beers and a bunch of prizes for the team to win if this succeeds to be one of the first. So you can check out API escape room. Once we're done with the event, we're going to tell the story of how we've built it. We're going to tell the story of how it went. Hopefully people find the solutions. And hopefully people will find it exciting. If you have any questions about how we run those events, if you are interested to run a similar event and get your community engaged, come talk to me.