3 Lessons from Barracuda’s 2024 Hackathon

Continuing our tradition of conducting internal hackathons (sometimes called Cudathons) each year, Barracuda recently hosted a hackathon with our product teams from around the world to help drive innovation and fresh ideas. We got a chance to catch up with a few of the people who participated to learn more about what the experience was like and how the event helped them. Here are a few of the themes that stood out.

Lesson 1: The power of collaboration

Many participants pointed to collaboration as one of the key elements that helped them succeed and one of the aspects of the experience that they enjoyed most as they worked together develop different ideas and overcome challenges.

“Participating in a hackathon is both thrilling and challenging, especially when you are racing against the clock. One of the key factors was gathering different ideas on what problem to tackle and how to approach it. This required collaborating with team members, addressing challenges, and working on different strategies.”

— Megha Kadur - Sr. Software Engineer • Content Security Engineer

You can read more about Megha’s hackathon experience in an article she wrote on LinkedIn.

Lesson 2: Mentorship and problem solving

Team members also talked about how much mentors helped them learn during the hackathon, especially about problem solving as the teams worked together to find the best solution.

“During the hackathon, mentorship played a crucial role in my progress and overall learning. I received excellent guidance from my team, and since much of what we used in our project was new to me, I learned a lot along the way. We executed complex deployment strategies like blue-green and canary releases, which added robustness to our pipeline. We also integrated Grafana and Prometheus for visual monitoring and analytics, further enhancing the project’s capabilities.

Beyond the technical knowledge, I learned a great deal about problem-solving and teamwork from our mentors. The mentorship and learning opportunities during the hackathon had a significant impact on both my personal and professional growth. Working closely with experienced mentors boosted my confidence in solving complex problems, and I learned to approach challenges critically, break them down methodically, and apply security best practices when integrating features like rollbacks into our CI/CD pipeline.”

— Amrutha Channalli - Associate Software QA Engineer • Content Security Engineer

You can read more about Amrutha’s hackathon experience in an article she wrote on LinkedIn.

Lesson 3: The importance of adapting quickly

The hackathon also to participants how to think on their feet, communicate consistently, and adjust as fast as possible.

“With the experience I've gathered over the years, I focused on breaking down the problem into manageable tasks and assigning them based on each team member’s strengths during the recent 2024 Barracuda hackathon. We adopted a dynamic approach where we communicated constantly, ensuring that blockers were resolved quickly. This was a fast-moving environment that required decisive action, so we kept communication open and agile, using short bursts of feedback loops and daily touchpoints.

For me, one of the key takeaways from the hackathon was the importance of rapid prototyping and something that is usually named iterative development. The experience reinforced that, in time-constrained environments, delivering a functional MVP (minimum viable product) can open doors for more innovative ideas later on. I have taken this into my everyday work by focusing on iterative development.”

— Ashish Singh - Principal Engineer

You can read more about Ashish’s hackathon experience in an article he wrote on LinkedIn.