HackOps 1.0 Report

More than anything, HackOps 1.0 was a significant milestone for the team. We set out to build a tool that will change the development landscape in Africa and by extension globally, providing a low-cost solution for developers to go from code to cloud and breaking the DevOps literacy barrier. The maiden edition of our developer hackathon HackOps 1.0 provided a platform for us to demonstrate this.

Not being ignorant of the realities of our community, we decided to also use this platform to challenge developers to build solutions that hit close to home, highlighting 5 major sectors; Healthcare, Finance, Education, Project Management, Travel and Hospitality.

Developers across Africa brainstormed and developed solutions to problems across these sectors in a 5-day virtual hackathon. We invited the top 25 projects as selected by our judges to the final event in Lagos.

The goal of this report is to highlight technologies, projects, partnerships, participants, and other key metrics of the hackathon and to give you a hint at what is possible with PipeOps as a cloud deployment tool and an enabler of the African tech ecosystem.

This demonstration is a statement that developers and entrepreneurs don’t have to look outside anymore.

Total number of participants

754

Unique technologies used

27

Average DevOps experience level

1.5/5

Total number of projects

85

Most popular skill

Fullstack Engineering

Participants

How many people participated in this edition of HackOps?

754 participants completed the registration process before the deadline on the 12th of June, 2024.

What were the most popular skills?

Most technical participants were Full Stack Developers and most non-technical participants were Designers.

How experienced were the technical participants in DevOps?

We told participants to rate their DevOps skills on a scale of 1 - 5, 9 out of 10 technical participants selected less than 2.

What did developers have to say about the hackathon?

Participants were quite chatty about their experience, you can follow the conversations on X and LinkedIn using the official hackathon hashtags, #HackOps1, #BuildingforProductivity.

Highlights:

• "The hackathon was a great eye-opener as well, looking forward to HackOps 2.0."

• “Your support throughout the hackathon was invaluable, and we're grateful for the opportunity to work with such innovative tools.”

What did developers have to say about their experience using PipeOps?

Participants noted:

• "One thing I love about PipeOps and the team themselves is that they are organized and they act on everything they talk about."

• "Regarding our experience deploying on PipeOps, we found the platform to be very robust and user-friendly."

Technologies

What was the total number of deployments made?

A deployment is made whenever a pod is successfully created on a server, this happened 36 thousand times. Developers only had to connect their repo and their projects got updated every time they made a commit, courtesy of CI/CD pipelines that are automatically integrated with every PipeOps account.

What technologies did participant build their solutions with?

Across all the projects that were submitted, we found 27 different technologies, HTML and ReactJS being the most popular frontend technologies, and Python being the most popular backend technology.

How useful were PipeOps Addons to participants?

Participants deployed addons into their servers right from PipeOps at no extra cost.

Projects

Project Sector Distribution

Healthcare and finance were the top sectors participants built for, 6 out of 10 solutions fell within these 2 categories.

Our Grand Prize winners

• Team Bendan emerged as the winner of HackOps 1.0 with their healthcare solution BDMeds aimed at providing quick access to doctors and organizing patient records efficiently.

• Team Medix in Second Place built Medix, an AI platform designed to generate medical notes and patient instructions based on doctor-patient conversations.

• Team Isis in Third Place built MedixDB, aiming to revolutionize Healthcare Records Management.

Additional Recognitions

Various teams were recognized for their innovative solutions, including:

• Team Trvelr: developed a platform for vacation planning.
• Team Quiryfy: designed a platform empowering students in their studies.

A few takeaways from this report

The metrics shared in this report are a representation of expected productivity challenges in our society. PipeOps addresses these issues by providing deployment-ready servers on trusted cloud providers, allowing any developer to deploy to the cloud effectively, and focusing on delivering the best value for developers and businesses.