Hack Into the Future: Announcing the Traefik Proxy 3.0 Hackaethon
Connect and collaborate with developers worldwide to build the future of Traefik Proxy!
Traefik Proxy 3.0 is coming, and what better way to celebrate than a Hackaethon! The next major release of Traefik Proxy is all about granting long-held community wishes and improving performance. So, naturally, this year’s Hackaethon will be focused on answering the community’s most burning requests and collaborating with all of you in making Traefik Proxy even more powerful!
The Traefik Proxy 3.0 Hackaethon will take place for three days, across multiple time zones, from September 27th through September 29th. But brace yourselves — this is not going to be an ordinary hackathon! This time we are focusing on some of the biggest challenges, and because of that, we are tweaking the rules of the game a bit:
- We will be accepting breaking changes.
- We identified the most wanted features, and we’ll be offering bounties to the teams that work on them.
- If the feature that your team is tackling is really large, instead of coding the finished project, we’ll be accepting the full design as the equivalent.
As always, we have amazing rewards prepared for all participants, including limited edition t-shirts and stickers, extra special swag for 1st, 2nd and 3rd places, $250 bounties for most-wanted features, and a grand prize of $1000!
Feeling ready for the adventure? Sign up below! If you want to learn more about the Hachaethon format, schedule, scoring system, and prizes, just keep reading; everything you need to know is here.
Format and schedule
Once you sign up for the Traefik Proxy 3.0 Hackaethon, we will send you an invitation via email to join the Hackaethon Discord a week before the event opens. In our Discord server, you will have a week to share ideas with other competitors and the Traefik Labs team. Our engineers will be there to help you gauge how difficult your idea is, what pitfalls you may encounter (or we have already encountered), and how to approach the existing code. Traefik Labs engineers can also help you understand how your idea might be scored.
This is a great time to meet with other participants and build your team.
On the day the Hackaethon starts, you will be assigned a Traefik Labs mentor who specializes in the areas your project touches on. They will check on you every few hours and be available to answer questions and give feedback.
Once you decide on your project, you can choose the format that you will be turning in.
- Large projects: If you choose a very large or complicated feature, you can choose to submit the complete design specs. You will be able to share the design details in a GitHub issue template we will provide the week before the event begins.
- Medium and small features: Full-fledged pull requests ready for review are always welcome and have a chance for more points.
- Documentation: You may also choose to submit substantive documentation updates. For documentation updates will be using pull requests on GitHub.
💡🤓Tip: Before choosing your project, make sure to check the list of the most wanted features below. Don’t miss your chance to claim one of the juicy bounties!
All PRs and issues submitted to GitHub between September 27 to September 29 by someone signed up for the hackathon will be eligible for winning one of the prizes. If someone on your issue/pr is not signed up, we might know your submission should be judged for the grand prize. So make sure your whole team is signed up for the Hackaethon!
The schedule is as follows:
- Planning week: Form teams, work with Traefik Labs engineers to refine your ideas, and get feedback. Make sure to check out the code of conduct and scoring card.
- Day one (September 27th) — The Hackaethon officially kicks off at midnight in all time zones. Every team will create its own team channel/rooms. Traefik Labs engineers will be assigned to each team and will check in with the teams every two hours to answer any questions.
- Day two (September 28th) — The Hackaethon continues following the day one format. The Traefik Labs team will remain available and continue to check in with each team every two hours to answer questions.
- Day three (September 29th) — Coding continues! The Traefik Hackaethon 2022 ends at midnight in all time zones.
Reviewing process and prizes
Once the Hackaethon is concluded, we’ll start reviewing all submitted projects. The selection of winners will be based on the following scoring system:
| Community value | |
|---|---|
| Prove that your change has a widespread positive impact. An easy way to make sure your project adds value by choosing a topic that already exists as an issue with current support. |
| Functionality | |
|---|---|
| Clearly understood the constraints of the existing code base with help from the Traefik Labs team. | |
| Code/design does not block future activities (don’t code us into a corner). | |
| Breaking changes are used judiciously. |
| Design | |
|---|---|
| Complete design | |
| All major use cases are identified and addressed. | |
| All risks are identified and addressed. | |
| Impacts for changes on UX are identified and defended. | |
| Communication | |
| The design is clearly communicated and easy for an international team to follow. | |
| Innovation | |
| Show a unique understanding of the problem and solution. | |
| Solve existing problems in the most efficient way. | |
| Outsmart the Traefik Labs team — for example, providing an easier alternative for a case where Traefik Labs engineers believe a breaking change is needed. |
| Ambition | |
|---|---|
| Contribution size | |
| Make sure touched files/lines are changed as appropriate. | |
| Contribution difficulty | |
| How difficult is the problem you are trying to solve? | |
| Working proof of concept (POC) | |
| Your changes must compile. | |
| Your project must succeed in proving its design. | |
| Your changes must pass the existing linter, unit, and integration test | |
| Pay attention to the implementation of the changes: quality code, well-documented, and easy to follow. | |
| Working code/documentation | |
| No POC is needed if there is a working code or documentation section. Working code or documentation will count as POC as well and will be worth an extra 10 points. |
💰 All participants contributing during the Hackaethon will be eligible to win the grand prize.
🥇 1st place: $1000 and a limited edition Hackaethon hoodie
🥈 2nd place: $500 and a limited edition Hackaethon hoodie
🥉 3rd place: $250 and a limited edition Hackaethon hoodie
😎 Limited edition t-shirts and Hackaethon stickers will be sent to the participants of all accepted projects.
Note: Monetary prizes are awarded on a per team basis; swag prizes are awarded on a per person basis.
Bounties
On top of the grand prize, participants will have the chance to claim $250 bounties for contributing to top-wanted features. We have a list of Traefik Proxy features targeting the v3.0 release that are much-anticipated and wanted by the community; these include:
- Enhanced automated Certificate Management (CRL, OCSP): Detect revoked certificates to automate transition to new, valid certificates with LetsEncrypt.
- Native Kubernetes LetsEncrypt implementation: Easier deployment and management by storing Lets Encrypt certificates natively as secrets instead of relying on external file storage.
- Integrate Traefik CRD with external DNS: External DNS is a huge topic inside the K8s community. Integrating directly with it will lower users’ work and the barrier of using it together with Traefik Proxy.
- FastCGI support: Addressing the need for an intermediary web server for PHP and other CGI-based apps.
- Sticky sessions based on ipv4/ipv6 hash: Allow an additional option to identify sticky sessions, based on an ipv4/ipv6 hash rather than using only injection cookies.
- Runtime data in dynamic config: Using dynamic data in the configuration allows for more fine-grained situations to add, for example, dynamic header values.
- Brotli compression: Add higher-performing compression as an alternative to GZip.
See you all in September
It goes without saying that we are very excited about this Hackaethon. We can’t wait to meet you all, collaborate live with developers all over the world, share ideas, and spark ongoing future collaboration on making the most popular open source cloud native networking tool even more powerful!
