Announcing the Okta Identity Early Access Hackathon Winners

Name: Bubble Connect
Prize: $500 USD
Description: Authenticated Twillio/WhatsApp chatbot.

Bubble Connect, from Avi Wolicki, shows the idea of allowing a user to prove their identity when dealing with a chatbot. It’s described by its creator as "an easy-to-use integration providing authentication in chatbots and other messaging services such as WhatsApp and SMS." We’d love to see how this application evolves further.

Name: App_ builder_
Prize: $3,000 USD
Description: Application to bootstrap and configure Okta sample applications.

Folks from Okta’s Developer Relations team love to build with and create tools that get working applications up and running quickly, like Spring / Steeltoe Initializers, code.quarkus.io, and the Okta CLI, so it wasn’t a big leap for us to see potential in App_ builder_.

Sameera Perera, who developed App_builder_, was motivated by curiosity, and by the desire to share what he’d learned. With his collection of starter templates, Sameera succeeds magnificently in his goal of "facilitating an easiest path for new users who need a lot of references to build up their first project." We can’t wait to see what new templates are next.

Name: Bill Panda
Prize: $5,000 USD
Description: Personal bill payment reminder system.

Bill Panda is one of the nicest custom-themed implementations of the Okta Sign-In Widget we’ve seen to date, and makes use of self-registration and MFA flows. The application lets you add recurring bills, expenses, and budgets, and create projections.

Marco Ledesma made Bill Panda to satisfy a personal itch. Learning about Okta auth has given him ideas for new features, and other ways to extend his project. We can’t wait to see what’s next for the panda, and look forward to hearing about the Laravel package mentioned by Marco for integrating Okta.

Name: GooseClip
Prize: $10,000 USD
Description: Authenticated peer-to-peer communication platform

Matthew Mckenzie’s GooseClip submission was in a league of its own. The project features a highly polished demo video, as well as web, CLI, and mobile applications that demonstrate aspects of the project as well as its creator’s technical prowess. Rooted in the Go programming language, and inspired by "a frustration at the lack of interoperability of our modern devices," GooseClip "integrates fast, secure peer-to-peer functionality" into a project in a few simple steps. It obscures the complexity of peer-to-peer networking by presenting a 2-route API, /attach and /connect.

Matthew has big plans to evolve GooseClip, and we plan to follow along. Here’s hoping the grand prize will help this goose take flight!

There are many roads to glory, and all developers rely on the work of those who came before them. Sometimes help comes in the form of code—libraries, building blocks, open source projects. Other times, good information and solid guidance at the right time can mean the difference between failure and success.

We awarded the "most supportive hacker" prize to three individuals, based on the number of valuable and helpful responses they provided to other participants on the Okta Developer Forum’s hackathons category during the competition.

Let’s close with kudos to Lenya Hope (1st place), Monish Basaniwal (2nd place), and Chaitanya Shah (3rd place) – who didn’t let competition get in the way of generous collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Thank you all.

We’re thrilled with the results of this Early Access Hackathon experiment, delighted by the creative range of submission, and the geographic diversity of the qualifying submissions. We had winners from the United Kingdom, the United States, Sri Lanka, Israel, and India, and participation from dozens of countries.

We’ve been surveying and listening to feedback from participants, and we’re compiling what we’ve learned, so that we can prioritize what comes next for the Okta Identity Engine, and the tooling developers need to build more great apps and services.

Have a fun hackathon story to share? Let us know with a comment below. For more interesting content, follow @oktadev on Twitter, connect with us on LinkedIn, and subscribe to our YouTube channel.