Announcing the first MariaDB Hackathon – in India!

Update 2024-10-15: The event has been cancelled in favour of something better. Please see the end of this post.

On the 24th – 25th October 2024 we will be hosting our first-ever Hackathon as part of our larger MariaDB Foundation presence around Open Source India.

What is a Hackathon?

If you have never done one before, it is basically a fun and challenging technology event where the goal is to create new things. Attendees are split into small teams of 5-10 people. An open source project is chosen to create and/or improve upon, and you have a day to work on it (and night as well if you really want to).

MariaDB Wins at the CloudFest Hackathon

OK, MariaDB Server didn’t specifically win, but a project around the MariaDB Catalogs feature won and the team behind it was led by me. In this post, I shall dig into what the CloudFest Hackathon is, what we did there and why it is a big deal.

CloudFest and the Hackathon

CloudFest is an event that happens every year in Europa Park, which is normally an amusement park, located in Rust, Germany. It is a fantastic web hosting and cloud event that spans a whole week, and there are often a lot of entertainment events happening around the main event.

MariaDB Health Checks in WordPress

In a previous blog post, I gave an overview of the CloudFest Hackathon. At this event my team created a plugin for WordPress which added additional health checks for MariaDB. Since the Hackathon we have managed to get this plugin into the official WordPress plugin repository and are working on improving it.

About the plugin

The plugin is designed in a modular way with multiple parts that can be useful for WordPress administrators. The following is a breakdown of all the parts currently in the plugin.

Metrics

One of the core features is gathering metrics about the queries executed.

MariaDB Foundation at CloudFest Hackathon

On the 18th – 20th of March there was a Hackathon before the CloudFest conference. This had 11 projects and well over 100 participants every team producing something great. In fact, thanks to the Hackathon, there is a new MariaDB Health Checks plugin available for WordPress.

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