Win an NVIDIA DGX Spark + $20,000 at the Cloud Native Hackathon

Join us on Monday, November 9 at The Shop Workspace in Salt Lake City for a full day of building with developers from the cloud native community. Pick something that makes conferences painful, fix it using tools from Sonar, Dash0, Radar, OpenAI and Elasticsearch, then demo it to Kelsey Hightower and the judges.
The best project overall takes home an NVIDIA DGX Spark, each of the four sponsor tracks has $4,000 in cash, the Merge Forward track wins an iPad, and everyone gets $50 in OpenAI credits plus swag.
Everyone is welcome, whether it's your first hackathon or your fiftieth. This is an in-person event, and we can't cover travel or accommodation.
Everything you need is here
All the resources, track details, judging criteria, setup guides and links are on the hackathon page. Check it out before the day so you can hit the ground running.
The challenge
Conferences are one of the best parts of tech, and also kind of a mess. Talks clash, rooms fill up, the best conversations happen in the hallway and you leave with 40 new connections you can't place. Your challenge is to make conferences easier, before, during or after, for attendees, speakers, sponsors or the people running the whole thing.
Tracks and prizes
Best overall project: NVIDIA DGX Spark. The strongest project of the day, from any track, wins a DGX Spark.
Sonar: Never Merge Broken ($4,000) with Gitar, Sonar's AI code verification agent
Dash0: Stop Flying Blind ($4,000) with Dash0's OpenTelemetry based observability platform
Radar: AI SRE ($4,000) with Radar, the open source Kubernetes UI with an AI SRE
Elasticsearch: Find the Right Talk ($4,000) with Elasticsearch, the search engine and vector database
Merge Forward: Conferences for Everyone (iPad) for the project that makes conferences more inclusive and accessible.
Every participant also gets a free Keychron mechanical keyboard, $50 in OpenAI credits and swag. Your project can enter every sponsor track whose tool it genuinely uses, plus the Merge Forward track, and every project is in the running for best overall.
Merge Forward is the CNCF community that builds safe, supportive spaces for people from underrepresented backgrounds and their allies in open source, with groups like Women in Cloud Native, Neurodiversity, and Deaf and Hard of Hearing. We want this hackathon to feel welcoming to everyone, so we're bringing the community along with its own track and prizes.

Agenda
Agenda (all times Mountain Time)
9:00 - 10:00 AM: Check-in and breakfast
10:00 - 11:00 AM: Workshops from our partner tools
11:00 AM - 2:00 PM: Building
2:00 - 3:00 PM: Lunch and panel
3:00 - 5:30 PM: Building (project submissions close at 5:30 PM)
5:30 - 7:00 PM: Judging, presentations and winners announced
7:00 PM: After party
What to bring
Your laptop, your charger and the will to experiment and learn. The hackathon page has a short checklist of accounts and tools to set up before you arrive.
After party 🎉
Once the winners are announced, come hang out with us at House of Kube, presented by Platform Engineering and hosted by Tailscale and Temporal. Expect platform engineers, founders and folks from across the cloud native community, with good food, craft cocktails (zero-proof too) and music, all on the house. Entry is free, so bring your teammates along. It's invite only, but your registration is confirmed right away and the venue address shows up once you sign up here.