Splunk’s first App Builder Contest was held September 12, 2012 at .conf 2012 in Las Vegas, NV and I am excited to report the conference and the hackathon were super fun!
The App Building Contest was hosted by Splunk>4Good and prizes were awarded for “Best Application” and “Best Application for Social Impact” by a panel of judges at the conclusion of the hackathon. The event drew over 50 participants and in ~4 hours they generated 10 total ideas with 7 working/demoable submissions.
In review of the hackathon Brad Lovering, Splunk VP of Engineering said, “This was honestly the highlight of the conference for me. It was so cool to see the creativity and energy and the things people were able to achieve with the product .. and in such a relatively short period of time.”
Participants were pointed at an array of public data sets and tasked with defining a problem and providing a solution. It was amazing to see the teams dive into the data and start asking interesting questions. I was wowed by the quality of submissions and work done in such a short period of time!
I simply couldn’t squeeze all the super fun details into this one blog post, so Splunk will be posting a short series on the winners and all the submissions. Participants were all over the map from writing a Splunk plugin for Winston to evaluating patient outcomes at your local hospital. Stay tuned to hear more about what was built!
Wondering what the prizes were? We gave away $250 Amazon Gift Certificates to each member of the winning team for both “Best App” and “Best App for Social Impact”. Bonus prize for “Best App with Social Impact” – a donation $500 to Geeks Without Bounds was made in honor of he 
winning team. If you aren’t familiar with the great work GWOB does to accelerate humanitarian projects via technology, they are worth checking out.