After the huge success of our first Azure Government HackFest + Training event in Washington, DC, our next HackFest + Training event in Sacramento, CA had a lot to live up to. With over 100+ attendees packed into the California Chamber of Commerce in Sacramento, we are pleased to say that the Sacramento HackFest event surpassed the first DC event!

We were so excited to see the enthusiasm of developers and IT pros come that came from agencies all over the state of California. The first day of the event primarily consisted of the training portion with a series of conference-style presentations.

Through a combination of members of the Azure Government Engineering team, as well as members of our SLG team including Scott Gruenemeier, Rick Joyer, Binh Cao, David Gollob, and Michael Cruz – we delivered presentations on the following topics:

• Introduction to Azure Government
• Getting Beyond Lift-and-Shift: Using PaaS Services on Azure Government
• Building Intelligent Apps with Cognitive Services on Azure Government
• Azure Data Services on Azure Government
• Bot Framework on Azure Government
• Analytics and AI on Azure Government

By the end of the first day, and into the entire second day, teams got to work creating many innovative solutions.

The event culminated in the final presentations where each team had an opportunity to briefly present their final solutions. We were thrilled to see the amazing solutions that teams built in such a short time! We LOVED hearing every time one of the teams said, “we couldn’t believe how easy it was to do <fill-in-the-blank> on Azure Government!”

Congratulations to our winners!

First Place: Team Jinn Erso

• Ashok Khatla
• Sitigui Ouattara
• Paul Maknovski
• Steve Breedlove

Second Place: Team R2-D2

• Manoj Beeravelli
• Pablo Fung
• Richard Hironaka
• Neeraj Seelam
• Robert Hayward

Third Place: Team Obi-wan Kenobi

• Daniel LIM
• Daniel Wharton
• Eric Miller
• Mary Shun
• Payal Shah
• Tuongvan Nguyen

Thank you to everyone who participated in this event! Keep a lookout for more of these events in cities throughout the United States. For those of you in the DC area, our next Azure Government HackFest event will be in Washington, DC on October 3-4 – register now before all the slots fill up!