BlueCat’s Hackathon: The Coolest Projects Of The Year
BlueCat’s annual Hackathon event is back and these are the coolest projects of the year. Check out the winning team’s projects here.
Key takeawaysThis key takeaway was generated through LLMs crawling the page and coming up with an overview of the content.The BlueCat annual Hackathon is a three-day, Snowmageddon-themed event that gathered 88 developers, designers, and marketers into 24 teams to build new functionality, solve customer problems, and create integrations for real-world network management challenges. Judges scored projects heavily on innovation, presentation, and capability, and the winning teams advanced practical solutions including DNS Edge logging integration, a tool to distinguish human versus machine DNS traffic to aid threat hunting, and deployment queue compression to improve admin efficiency. The event showcased operational impact for customers and administrators while highlighting BlueCat’s culture of cross-functional collaboration and continuous product-driven innovation.
What was the main purpose of this year’s BlueCat Hackathon and who participated?
The Hackathon’s primary purpose was to bring together cross-functional teams to develop new features, solve difficult customer problems, and create product integrations over an intensive three-day workshop. Participants included 88 people—developers, designers, and marketers—organized into 24 project teams, with a panel of five judges evaluating presentations against criteria emphasizing innovation, presentation, and capability. The event focused on producing practical, deployable solutions that address real-world network management and security needs for BlueCat customers.
What is BDDS on the Edge and what operational benefit does it provide?
BDDS on the Edge is a winning Hackathon project that modified an existing server to act as a service point which forwards queries to the cloud so BlueCat DNS Edge can log and analyze the data through a similar user interface. This extension makes DNS Edge functionality available to all existing customers by enabling edge servers to send telemetry and query data into the cloud analytics UI. Operationally, that provides centralized logging and analysis capabilities for distributed deployments, improving visibility and troubleshooting across customer networks.
How do the other winning projects improve security and deployment efficiency?
Blade Runner is a tool that accurately differentiates DNS traffic produced by humans from traffic generated by machines, providing threat hunters and SOC personnel with clearer evidence when investigating suspicious network behavior and reducing noise in security investigations. Deployment Queue Optimization compresses selective deployments within the same server to reduce deployment queues, resulting in faster, more efficient rollouts for network administrators. Together, these projects enhance security investigation fidelity and operational deployment throughput.
The annual BlueCat Hackathon brings together developers, designers, and marketers to develop innovative solutions that meet our customers’ ever-changing needs. This year’s event was an intensive three day workshop where teams developed new functionality, solved difficult customer problems, and created new integrations.
This year’s “Snowmageddon” themed Hackathon featured 24 project submissions, 88 participants, and a panel of five judges to make the final decision.
With scoring criteria that placed a heavy focus on innovation, presentation, and capability, our judges heard presentations from a total of twenty four teams. As BlueCat’s very own CTO Andrew Wertkin said, “There were so many good ideas, execution and presentations- it was very difficult to judge”- but it had to be done and here are this year’s winning teams:
BDDS on the Edge
Iris Xiao, George Dos Santos, Dmitri Dehteroy, Eric Ding and Tian Yu.
This team modified an existing server to act as a service point, sending queries out to the cloud so BlueCat DNS Edge can log and analyze the data through a similar UI. With this innovative new feature, the team made DNS Edge functionality available to all existing customers. Read more about DNS Edge’s capabilities in this blog post.
Blade Runner
Jeffrey Trenton, Luke Household, Stephen Steinberg, and Aaron Arnott.
This tool accurately identifies DNS traffic produced by humans versus DNS traffic generated by computers. In doing so, this tool will greatly assist threat hunters and SOC personnel who are investigating suspicious network behavior.
Deployment Queue Optimization
Catherine Morton, James Bai, John Lumby, JP Confessor, Vitaliy Panfilov, and Vibhav Agrawal.
This project focuses on reducing deployment queues by compressing selective deployments within the same server. The result: greater efficiency for network administrators.
Congratulations to the BDDS on the Edge team and everyone else who participated in this year’s Hackathon. This annual event is one of the most highly anticipated events at BlueCat. The smiles, excitement, and collective effort of these three days shows why that’s the case!
Check out our job postings here to join in on the fun!
Vanessa is a third-year student at the University of Waterloo and is currently working as the Marketing Programs Coordinator at BlueCat Networks.
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