Azure Government DC Hackfest + Training Recap

Steve Michelotti

We recently completed our fifth Azure Government HackFest + Training event (this being the second one in DC) and it drew an even bigger crowd than the first DC HackFest event back in June! This is following from our last successful Azure Gov HackFest in Sacramento. We were excited to see 100 people in attendance for this event!

Special thanks to the speakers we brought in from outside the Azure Government Engineering team to deliver presentations:

  • Ken Hausman
  • Jason Errett
  • Pishoy Bous
  • Dux Raymond Sy (CTO AvePoint Pub Sec)

On day 2 the teams were engaged building several compelling solutions. Here is one of our teams diagramming their solution on the white board. Teams built solutions ranging from secure IaaS networks, PaaS solutions with Web Apps, Cosmos DB, Storage, etc. Face and Object recognition solutions with Cognitive Services, and even multiple Power BI dashboards – and they did this all in one day. During the final presentations, we repeatedly heard statements like:

  • “I was surprised how easy it was to create a VM in Azure”
  • “We were shocked at how easy it was the call the Cognitive Services API”
  • “It was really easy to provision PaaS services so quickly”
  • “I can take this stuff back to my job and use it immediately”

The event culminated in final presentations where each team presented their final solutions. We were thrilled to see the amazing solutions that teams built in such a short time! Congratulations to our winners!

1st place – Team Han Solo

  • Rahul Gupta
  • Matthew Bramer

2nd place – Team Jyn Erso

  • Elkhan Yusubov
  • Ronald Payne
  • Jason Herring
  • Lokesh Pai
  • Jason Svoboda

3rd place – Team Rey

  • Michael Pong
  • David Zimmerman
  • Nancy Tickle
  • Clay Shearin
  • Deepak Kumar
  • Nathan Hawkes
  • Michael Wells
  • William Plumb

Thank you to everyone who participated in this event! Watch our blog for announcements of future HackFests in cities across the US – and let us know if you’re interested in the Azure Government Engineering team bringing a HackFest to your city!

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