BlueCat’s Hackathon: The Coolest Projects Of The Year

Last updated on April 29, 2021.

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!