Cloudfest 2023 W4A9782 1

CLOUDFEST HACKATHON 2023 RECAP

A Game-Changer for
Open-Source Tech!

April 7, 2023, by Carole Olinger, Head of CloudFest Hackathon

Close to 120 hackers from all over the world gathered at Europa-Park Rust, Europe’s biggest amusement park, for the CloudFest Hackathon 2023. Working on innovative and game-changing solutions to open-source tech challenges, this year’s event attracted the largest attendance yet, increasing last year’s ‘Greatest Hackathon Ever’ by almost 50%!
In a collaborative and dynamic environment, software engineers, developers, and web professionals had the unique opportunity to demonstrate their talents and develop new skills. The vibes were fantastic, as seen on social media hashtags #CFHack and #CFHack2023.

Let’s dive into the highlights of this year’s record-breaking CloudFest Hackathon, including the winning projects, our partners, and some epic photos.


Game-Changing Hackathon Projects

We are thrilled to showcase the eleven exceptional projects that emerged from the CloudFest Hackathon 2023, all of which have the potential to make a significant impact on the industry and the open web. From web applications to software tools, these projects represent the best and brightest ideas from the event’s talented participants.

The projects were selected based on a range of criteria, including innovation, impact, and technical complexity, and we are proud to have been the enabler of their development.


Results-Oriented Projects

To ensure that all the project teams had a clear and achievable vision for their work, we enlisted the help of two experienced hackers— Lucas Radke (Automattic) and Alain Schlesser (XWP)—who worked closely with our project leads. Together, they provided guidance and support in refining project ideas and setting goals for the hackathon.
Their contributions were invaluable in helping our teams to stay on track and make the most of their time at #CFHack2023!
And now, without further ado, here are the game-changing projects from CloudFest Hackathon 2023 that you’ll be hearing more about in the coming months:

Project Leads: Daniel Bachhuber and Adam Zielinski, Automattic


Goals: The team wanted to bring the entire WordPress development environment into the browser using WordPress Playground.


Achievements: They shipped three very promising demos:

  • An in-browser IDE with support for mobile devices and offline via StackBlitz
    👉 demo 1
  • A tailored in-browser code editor and terminal that can be customized to specific app needs 👉 demo 2
  • A VisualStudio code plugin that starts a WordPress server even if you don’t have PHP or MySQL installed 👉 demo 3 & demo 4

What’s next? These projects continue being developed on GitHub in the WordPress Playground repository. In the coming months, these code editing experiences will be tried and tested during various workshops to prepare it for the general WordPress audience.
👉 GitHub

Project Leads: Leonidas Milosis and Diede Exterkate, Yoast


Goals: Start creating a plugin that recalibrates the frequency of external requests happening from WordPress sites, for environmental and performance reasons.


Achievements: The team wrote a plugin with a couple of ways to automatically reduce a WP site’s external requests, thus decreasing its carbon footprint. Furthermore, they created an API that website owners can use to reduce the site’s external requests even further, depending on each site’s needs and functionalities.


What’s next? Implementations will be improved in order for the plugin to be considered production-level. If widely adopted as a canonical plugin, this project can potentially affect global Internet energy consumption considerably.
👉 Eco-mode website
👉 GitHub

Project Leads: Benjamin Trenkle and Harald Leithner, Department & Operations Coordinators at Joomla!


Goals: Implement a proof of concept for a multidomain solution for Joomla!


Achievements: The Joomla! Team finalized the proof of concept and started the main implementation. They also generated a lot of buzz in the Joomla!-Community about the project.


What’s next? Team Joomla! is planning the release of a new minor version for Joomla! in April, and also another major release this year. Therefore, the focus shifted a bit. The Multidomain-Solution is targeting Joomla! 6, where it is planned to have several additional sprints to finalize it.
👉 Joomla! Community

Project Leads: Anton Akhtyamov, WebPros


Goals: Create a CLI utility to analyze the file structure of a web hosting server and identify the frameworks, and CMS used in the websites hosted on it.


Achievements: The team added the identification of multiple technologies and frameworks as well as to the following CMS: WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, PrestaShop & TYPO3. They also created a sample integration of the utility to the Plesk web hosting panel – to show it’s possible to integrate into any software. It’s also possible to make it work as a CLI utility on UNIX servers.


What’s next? Integration into Plesk Panel to identify the technologies and provide reliable instruments for customers.
👉 GitHub
👉 Video Demo

Project Leads: Lucio Sá, Codeable


Goals: Improve an existing tool to perform security checks against plugins in runtime, create better static checks, and report the findings.


Achievements: We significantly increased the tool’s power, allowing it to find real vulnerabilities in published plugins. The tool is published and available for free on GitHub.


What’s next? To clean the codebase and create even better checks to increase the attack surface and lower the false positives.
👉 GitHub
👉 WPHackCebola website

Project Leads: Can Kirca, Senior System and Accessibility Specialist


Goals: Discuss and suggest sustainable solutions to improve accessibility in interactive tech events by creating a checklist for event organizers. Create a conditional form to collect and identify special requirements of the people who have a type of disability prior to the event. Create an open source platform to list attendee experiences.


Achievements: We created and integrated a website and GitHub repo, a conditional requirements form, and published PDF and DOCX formats of the accessibility checklist and guidelines.


What’s next? Prepare and publish the contact form on the website. Publish a page listing attendee experiences per event. An announcement board will be created to be used by future event organizers.

👉 Project website
👉 GitHub 

Project Leads: Marko Feldmann, Ionos


Goals: Build a notification service for WordPress users that utilizes a personalized Wapuu character to deliver messages.


Achievements:

The team created a website and several social media accounts, built the infrastructure for a proof of concept plugin streamlining the codebase and ensuring compatibility with a wide range of WordPress installations.

They also built various APIs to hook into with the plugin, allowing users to create their customized Wapuu with ease and flexibility, all while assuring an intuitive user experience.


What’s next? The team continues to make progress on WapuuGotchi. Stay tuned for more updates.

👉 Wapuugotchi website
👉 GitHub

Project Leads: Milana Cap, XWP


Goals: Build an engine for searching through code examples from WordPress code reference and WP-CLI documentation.


Achievements: Everything the team had planned, plus they added two more sources: PHP code reference and WordPress Dev notes from the WP Core blog.


What’s next? All hackathon participants continue contributing to the project: they are working on moving it to a more sustainable place, setting up the workflows and docs for continuous contribution and adding more features, identified during the hackathon.

👉 docs_dangit website
👉 GitHub
👉 Discord

Project Leads: Florian Brinkmann, web developer


Goals: Working on improvements and new features for the Statify plugin.


Achievements: Made good progress, worked on different issues, created new pull requests, and merged a few of them.


What’s next? Some work has already been done since the hackathon, mainly for preparing version 2 of Statify and getting a few more features ready for the release of Statify 2.0.

👉 Pluginkollektiv website
👉 GitHub

Project Leads: Andrew Hutchings, MariaDB Foundation


Goals: To add MariaDB Server health information to WordPress’s admin panel, so that any database problems are easily observable. Because a healthy sea lion helps keep Wapuu healthy too.


Achievements: MariaDB Server version end-of-life checks, some performance graphs, server variables displayed, one-button optimizer histogram enablement, Site Health integration, dashboard summary panel, and Spanish translations. Basically, everything is for a beta release.


What’s next? In the meantime, the project moved to the MariaDB Foundation GitHub account as an official MariaDB Foundation project, also in the WordPress.org plugin repository: Version 1.0.1 is released (mostly bug fixes). Also, licensing of the MariaDB Foundation sea lion has been set. More features and metrics are to be added soon, considering feedback from the community as to what they would like to see.

👉 Plugin link
👉 GitHub

Project Leads: Andrey Lippatsev and Johann Hofmann, Google


Goals: Raise awareness of the Privacy Sandbox in the developer community and create a helpful tool for developers and site owners to better understand how third-party cookies depreciation will affect them.


Achievements: The team made 100+ developers aware of the Privacy Sandbox, including the Executive Director of the WordPress OS project. They created a Chrome DevTools extension to visualize and classify cookies.


What’s next?  Parts of the team will continue looking at improving classification and I will look into ways to ensure the tool is going to be maintained.

👉 GitHub

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Hack for a Purpose: Friendly Competition at #CFHACK2023

At CloudFest Hackathon 2023, we wanted to do more than just recognize outstanding projects – we wanted to make a real impact. That’s why we partnered with the Groundbreaker Talents initiative, a program that funds scholarships for vocational training centers in Uganda specializing in development and IT education.

Thanks to the incredible contributions of our attendees and the unwavering support of our partners and the open-source communities, we were able to raise €3,500 for this worthy cause. We’re thrilled to announce that World Hosting Days GmbH has added another €1,500, bringing our total donation to €5,000—enough to fund a full scholarship for a future female developer in Uganda.

By supporting Groundbreaker Talents, we aim to help create a sustainable livelihood for young developers in Uganda, while also contributing to a better, and more diverse open web. We’re proud to have played a part in this effort and can’t wait to invite the scholarship recipient to join us at CloudFest Hackathon 2024!

hackathon cover 2

CloudFest Hackathon 2023 Award Winners

At CloudFest Hackathon 2023, a distinguished panel of eight judges—including the Head of CloudFest Hackathon, the two project mentors, and representatives from our partners and open-source contributors—had the tough job of selecting the winners in the following award categories

Eco-mode: Reduce outgoing network traffic of your WordPress server

Visionary Catalyst Award, sponsored by Automattic

docs_dangit: A search engine for WordPress developers

Dream Team Award, sponsored by Codeable

Eco-mode: Reduce outgoing network traffic of your WordPress server

Future of The Web Award, sponsored by WebPros

Wapuugotchi

Social Media Master Award, sponsored by Team “Wapuugotchi

WordPress Runtime Vulnerability Analysis

Pitch Perfect Award, sponsored by stella.maris-solutions

Overall Hackathon Winner

After much deliberation, we’re thrilled to announce the team emerging as the ultimate #CFHack Champion at CloudFest Hackathon 2023:

Eco-mode – reduce outgoing network traffic of your WordPress server

Congratulations to the talented and dedicated project leads and team members who brought this game-changing project to life.
This award has been proudly sponsored by Extendify

hackathon winner

CloudFest Hackathon 2023 Photos, Project Websites, and Media Coverage

Check out the photos from the event on the CloudFest Hackathon Flickr page:
👉 Hackathon Flickr
👉 Hackathon Attendee and Partner images

Blog Posts, Articles, Podcasts, and more

👉 WP Tavern
👉 WP Sofa
👉 Maria DB Foundation
👉 Yoast Eco-mode
👉 Webwisser
👉 Birgit Olzem’s Blog
👉 Bernhard Kau’s Blog
👉 Wapuugotchi Blog


Hackathon Review on the CloudFest Arena Stage

Our Head of CloudFest Hackathon, Carole Olinger, and star emcee Jeff Hardy took to the Arena stage at CloudFest to share their thoughts with the CloudFest audience on the incredible energy and creativity that characterized the event. Together with some representatives from the teams, they discussed the impressive projects that emerged from the hackathon, as well as the strong sense of community and collaboration that made it all possible.

Be sure to check out the CloudFest Arena recordings for their full recap of the unforgettable #CFHack2023 experience!

YouTube player

#CFHack2023 Eye Candy

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hackathon 2
hackathon 3
hackathon 4
hackathon 5
hackathon 6
hackathon 7
hackathon 8
hackathon 9
hackathon 10

CloudFest Passes

Standard Pass

499 € excl. VAT
Only for CloudFest’s core audience of CSPs, hosters, MSPs, corporate IT, web agencies, and WordPress developers.  

The Standard Pass is like general admission at a sports stadium or concert: you get the full access to the CloudFest venue, plus free lunch and coffee breaks; as well as free shuttle service to and from Offenburg.

Benefits

  • Access to the entire CloudFest venue at Europa-Park
  • Invitation to all of the main parties networking events
  • Event bag with CloudFest documentation
  • Participation in Keynote, Breakout, and Masterclass tracks, and Exhibition Hall
  • Catering, including lunch and coffee breaks
  • Free shuttle from Offenburg HBF to Rust and back

VIP Pass

999 € excl. VAT
Only for CloudFest’s core audience of CSPs, hosters, MSPs, corporate IT, web agencies, and WordPress developers.  

The VIP Pass is like box seats at a sports stadium or concert: you will enjoy all of the features included in the Standard Pass, plus VIP-only perks like private social events and free shuttle service around Europa-Park in high-end cars.

Benefits

  • All benefits from the Standard Pass
  • Chauffeured luxury car service between venues and EP hotels
  • Exclusive high-level networking events
  • Hotel VIP treatment and concierge service (Book your hotel separately
  • Access to VIP Lounge
  • Special lunch restaurant with gourmet catering

Vendor Pass

999 € excl. VAT
This pass is for professionals who sell to CloudFest’s core channel.

The Vendor Pass gives you full access to the venue, as well as discoverability and meeting tools so you can meet your most motivated customers. You also get free lunch and coffee breaks; as well as free shuttle service to and from Offenburg.

Benefits

  • Access to the entire CloudFest venue at Europa-Park
  • Invitation to all of the main parties networking events
  • Event bag with CloudFest documentation
  • Participation in Keynote, Breakout, and Masterclass tracks, and Exhibition Hall
  • Catering, including lunch and coffee breaks
  • Free shuttle from Offenburg HBF to Rust and back
  • The ability to book 1on1 Meeting Tables
  • Badge scanning to create downloadable lead lists with your smartphone
  • Inclusion in a dedicated Vendor Register so attendees can find and connect with the vendors they want to meet

Vendor VIP Pass

1,999 € excl. VAT
This pass is for professionals who sell to CloudFest’s core channel.

The Vendor VIP Pass is like getting box seats at a sports stadium or concert: you get all the features included in the Vendor Standard Pass, plus VIP-only perks like private social events and free shuttle service around Europa-Park in high-end cars.

Benefits

  • All benefits from the Vendor Pass
  • Chauffeured luxury car service between venues and EP hotels
  • Exclusive high-level networking events
  • Hotel VIP treatment and concierge service (Book your hotel separately)
  • Access to VIP Lounge
  • Special lunch restaurant with gourmet catering

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