Our first Azure Government HackFest + Training event is in the books and it was a great event! We were thrilled to see so many enthusiastic developers and IT Pros in Azure Government interested in learning new things and getting even more hands-on with Azure Government.

The first day of the event was marked by several in-depth presentations by members of the Azure Government Engineering team.

Speakers included:

• Steve Michelotti, Azure Government Chief Evangelist
• Zach Kramer, Azure Government Engineering Lead
• Sachin Dubey, Senior Software Engineer, Azure Government
• John Molesky, Program Manager, Azure Government
• Gerardo Saca, Senior Program Manager, Azure Government

The second day of the event was dedicated to our hands-on HackFest. Participants were divided into eight teams and given a series of challenges they could choose from including:

• Building solutions on Azure Government PaaS services
• Building a secure/compliant IaaS network infrastructure on Azure Government
• Utilizing Cognitive Services on Azure Government
• Leveraging Big Data on Azure Government with HDInsight and Power BI

We were thrilled to see the types of solutions that our teams build. Even more importantly, we were exciting to see all the hands-on learning that took place. The primary goal of these events is to learn, and understand how the technology can better empower your agencies.

We were even fortunate enough to get a surprise visit from Jason Zander, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Azure – yet another example of the dedication that Microsoft has to the developer and technical community in Azure Government.

Congratulations to our winners!

First Place: Team Yoda

• Brian Rudolph
• Daniel Suenkel
• Jonathan Eckman
• Nicolas Mark
• Zara Ellini

Second Place: Team Count Dooku

• Bazin Melesse
• Bryce Harding
• Jayesh Lakhiani
• Jeffrey Glossop
• Jeremy Brun
• Kha Tran
• Peter Graupp
• Peter Karp

Third place: Team Han Solo

• Elkhan Yusubov
• Manuela Costescu
• Nisha Patil
• Rama Krishna Manne
• Shahida Cheema
• Vignesh Sunder Rajan

Thank you to everyone who participated in the event. We plan to do similar events soon including expanding to other geographic locations focusing on our SLG customers. As always, we’re interested in your feedback so please contact us if you have suggestions for how we can improve these events in the future.