4 min read
We kicked off June with the first-ever Vercel Hackathon, focused on creating integrations.
The event was a phenomenal success. Over 250 participants joined us from every corner of the world to submit high quality integrations that improve their workflow. After much deliberation, our judges finally have the results, and we are thrilled to announce the winners.
First Place
The winner of the first-ever Vercel Hackathon is George Karagkiaouris with his Storyblok integration.
George's integration is very comprehensive. From within the Vercel Dashboard, you can:
Register or login to your Storyblok account
Gain insights to your Storyblok spaces and deployments
Deploy Storyblok starter projects for Next.js or Nuxt.js in 3 easy steps
Open Storyblok's live visual editor with your new project as the preview source
Thanks to George, you can now take advantage of a sophisticated headless CMS in seconds.
We're giving George some phenomenal prizes:
$5,000 cash
RAMA WORKS M60-A Vercel Edition Mechanical Keyboard
An all-expense paid trip to San Francisco
Mentoring sessions with expert judges like James Tamplin
Second Place
Mike Coutermarsh wins second place with his Image Optimizer integration.
Mike's integration analyses images in deployments and makes lossless optimizations available.
Thanks to Mike, you can now keep image sizes for your projects under control for every deployment.
We're giving Mike some amazing prizes:
$2,000 cash
RAMA WORKS M60-A Vercel Edition Mechanical Keyboard
Serverless Hardware Hacking Kit
Third Place
Faraz Patankar and Ratik Sharma win third place for their UptimeRobot integration.
Faraz and Ratik built an extensive integration that allows you to monitor the status of your deployments.
Once installed, you can:
Set up public status pages to share with customers
Provision UptimeRobot monitors and change their status
Monitor response times and uptime for your endpoints
Set up additional alert contacts and remove existing ones
Thanks to Faraz and Ratik, you can now set up, monitor, and share the status of your apps easily.
They will each receive a RAMA WORKS M60-A - Vercel Edition Mechanical Keyboard (only 5 will ever be given away).
Category prize: .tech
The winner of the .tech category prize is Patrik Holčák, for his DNS editor integration.
Until now, you could only edit your DNS with Vercel CLI. Thanks to Patrik, you can update your DNS settings directly from your Vercel Dashboard.
Patrik will receive $500 cash, courtesy of .tech domains.
Gifts from Sponsors
In addition to the prizes we already highlighted, every winner will receive special gifts from our sponsors: Airtable, CodePen, GitLab, GitHub, Auth0, Framer, Algolia, Twilio, and Sentry.
Organization
As a fully-remote company, we know first-hand that great talent is everywhere, and made the conscious decision to organize this event primarily online.
We hosted participants from everywhere — the US, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. They all joined us on a Slack workspace we set up exclusively for the weekend. Every team was provided with a private channel that included team members, Vercel staff for support, and representatives from companies they were building integrations for.
The #watercooler channel was a big hit — throughout the weekend, participants shared pictures of their desk setup, meals, views from their window from around the world — we were physically far away, yet we were all together. Based on the feedback we received, participants loved the online setup and found it to be an efficient way to collaborate.
Acknowledgements
This event wouldn't have been possible without the support of our judges, sponsors, and partners.
Judges
We can't thank our esteemed judges enough for taking time out of their busy schedules to help with scoring the submissions: James Tamplin, Jessie Frazelle, Daniel Levine, Chris Coyier, Soleio Cuervo, Francisco Tolmasky, Kathy Simpson, Jordan Walke, Priyanka Sharma, Jorn van Dijk, David Cramer, Pete Hunt, Matias Woloski, Rafael Corrales, Pranay Prakash, Fedor Indutny, Max Rovensky, and Naoyuki Kanezawa. Many of our judges have also very kindly offered to meet with winners.
Sponsors
Huge shout out to our sponsors Contentful, Mux, Twilio, ReadMe, MongoDB, LogDNA, Segment, Pusher, Algolia, Airtable, Storyblok, .tech domains, and RAMA WORKS for making this event possible. We're grateful to the staff at sponsoring companies who volunteered their time in the weekend — participants loved your guidance!
A special note of thanks to Airtable, Auth0, GitLab, GitHub, Sentry, CodePen, Framer, Algolia, Braintree, and Twilio for offering amazing special prizes and swag for our winners.
Partners and Special Participants
We'd like to thank our partners Hasura and Pioneer for their support throughout the event. The team at Sentry deserves a special mention, for making arrangements to host our San Francisco participants at their office despite our last minute request, as well as Vivian Chromwell for her incredible photography.
Finally, something special — our heartfelt thanks goes to Luka Kakia, Mo Rajbi, George Karagkiaouris, Faraz Patankar, Alec Jones, Ratik Sharma, and Rob Brennan, who not only joined the hackathon as participants but also selflessly offered help to all other participants.
The Next Hackathon
Seeing the success of this hackathon, we have decided to do a second Vercel Hackathon!
To pre-register for the biggest ever Vercel Hackathon, please use this form
To explore sponsorship, please use this form
Conclusion
This first hackathon has turned out to be incredibly inspiring for the Vercel team. We saw a variety of integrations being built — Airtable, environment managers, and even marketplaces. Through the course of the event, we received a ton of feedback on our integrations platform and documentation, which will help us refine the product even further.
If you were a part of this hackathon, please leave us feedback on how we did.
You can also get in touch with us over Twitter.