**Mat Ryer:** Hello, welcome to Grafana's Big Tent, podcast all about the people, community, tools, and tech around observability. We're today talking all about the hackathon. Mat Toback is here, I think, just laughing at my face at this point.

**Matt Toback:** No, no, it's good to be back with you on the podcast. Tools, community, people, and tech.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, that is way too late because that's been in every episode. We could go back in time and change them all. Who do we have today? No, are we interviewing again? Let's try again. Hello.

**Matt Toback:** No, go ahead. I'm not going to get us out of this parking lot.

**Mat Ryer:** No, I like it. I like just being told what to say by you and then I just have to say it exactly otherwise you just stop me. And yeah, that's good. I think it's good. Okay, yeah, so well today we're talking about the hackathon again, and particularly the science fair projects, which is very exciting. And I'll talk a bit more about what that is. But yes, let's meet our panel. Well, Matt Toback.

**Matt Toback:** Matt Toback here. We've talked to you already. Yeah.

**Mat Ryer:** Sven, Sven is also here. Sven, my friend, hello.

**Sven Großmann:** Sven Großmann, yes. Hey, hey, hello, Mat. Hello.

**Mat Ryer:** Hello. So Großmann, if I translate that, it means massive man. Is that big man? Is that big man?

**Sven Großmann:** Yeah, yeah. Big man. Maybe. Big man.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, there's quite a modest last name, isn't it? What is your name in German though?

**Sven Großmann:** I don't know. My name? It might be a bird. It might be a bird. Could be. I don't know. I mean, we might have some dashboards to check for it, right?

**Mat Ryer:** Well, you do a lot of projects about birds. I know you know a lot about birds.

**Sven Großmann:** No, I do projects because I don't know much about it. Is this for sure? Yeah. Sven wants to track where all the birds in the world are. Is that not going to rest? Is this the true thing that pre-existed your time at Grafana? So I don't know. I mean, I've done a lot of dashboards and birds.

[00:02:02]

**Mat Ryer:** So yeah. Do you play Wingspan?

**Sven Großmann:** No. All right. I have it, but I never played it actually.

**Mat Ryer:** Has anyone else in our panel played Wingspan? Oh, I've got none from Alexa. Oh my God. Alexa, hello. Welcome.

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** Hello, yes. I actually play Wingspan. But I don't have dashboards with birds. So...

**Mat Ryer:** Can we change this podcast to talk about Wingspan instead of dashboards? Or instead of hackathons, please?

**Sven Großmann:** I don't know what it is. What is it?

**Mat Ryer:** Oh, Alexa, tell them.

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** All right.

**Mat Ryer:** You don't trade in like a home assistant. That is the most... I can't believe we talked about this. Are we allowed to say what happened before this? And we said, and Alexa's only request was, please, under no circumstances make a joke about my name.

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** I'm sorry. I cannot help you with that. The only thing that I can say is a board game, but I don't have more data. I play with the friends who are very fans of Wingspan, and I just play them. They explain the rules every single time, and I just play.

**Mat Ryer:** Okay. Nice. Okay, but a board game. Well, I'm learning already. Lukasz is also joining us. Hi, Lukasz. How are you?

**Lukasz Gut:** Hey, everyone. I'm good. It's pleasure to be here. As I was doing. I'm all right. Thanks.

**Mat Ryer:** Do you play Wingspan?

**Lukasz Gut:** No, I do play some other board games, though. I think my favorite one is Neuroshima Hex. This, actually, I believe, made by a Polish creator, a Polish artist. And it's a little bit like chess, but in 5D, it's quite complex. And the interactions, they get pretty tense, but it's so much fun. So if anyone is here, wants to pick up a great board game, Neuroshima Hex is definitely a way to go.

**Mat Ryer:** Right. And that's within the laws of physics. Is that this game? Interplanetary physics.

**Lukasz Gut:** Yes.

**Mat Ryer:** Okay. 4D normally just when you, because you go to the 4D theaters and the theme parks,

[00:04:02]

and it just like spritzes water in your face. Yeah. That's 4D chess. Okay. 4D chess. If you lose a pawn, if you lose a pawn, you get a spray in the face and your chair rockets. And there's a shot of air from somewhere. Sven, I'm sorry. I feel like we didn't give you an opportunity. What board games do you play?

**Sven Großmann:** I don't know. But I was like, I have the question, like if you have Wingspan, other wing traces as well, or wing metrics, wing logs, how there we go.

**Mat Ryer:** There we go. You know, actually, I don't play that much. I play a bit of chess, a bit of, do a bit of sports. But that's it.

**Sven Großmann:** Yeah.

**Mat Ryer:** At the same time, or separate?

**Sven Großmann:** I think there are some, like, I don't know, championships are about that. Yeah. But it's mostly, I've seen drinking and playing and not playing chess, but yeah.

**Mat Ryer:** But that's just normal chess. Well, how many dimensions is normal chess played in? I guess it is 3D because you're in 3D space. But then also time, do you count that as the fourth dimension? Can you move the time? Do you have to be able to manipulate it in order to play it? Ah, so the time doesn't count. Unless you yourself traveling really fast relative to someone else. Yeah. You get it's my advantage. You can start and stop the time with the clock.

**Sven Großmann:** Oh.

**Mat Ryer:** You can manipulate it. Oh, yeah. You can't stop time with it. How is that work time? Okay, I'm time. No, it's fun. It doesn't pull. Oh, yeah. It's a universe. No. No. All right. So then, chess corner. How would you put traces, logs or metrics onto observing a chess game? Let's do this quick.

**Sven Großmann:** So I think, yeah. Does, you have to move your logs and get them over to the right place.

**Mat Ryer:** Oh, no, no, no. I don't mean that. I don't mean it's the pieces. I mean, how would you instrument a chess game? So metrics would be the amount of moves, amount of, how would that go?

**Sven Großmann:** Yeah, moves over time, I guess. I mean, a trace is simple, right? It's just how a piece moves, maybe. So you'd be able to go and see, like, this rook

[00:06:02]

would have made all these individual moves throughout the game. Yeah. And then, maybe events would be when a rook takes out another piece or something like that. Like an event at a trace.

**Mat Ryer:** Oh, that's kind of fun. Yeah. And then how, what would you alert on? I guess anything, but what would be interesting?

**Sven Großmann:** A check, obviously.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. I think losing a piece, that's an alert in it. You want to, you probably, we were all right getting working up. If you've lost a bishop. Yeah. If you fall asleep in the middle game. Yeah, but you've got have your OnCall stuff set up as well. If you're doing it properly. And then you run machine learning on it for predicting the next move. Right? But I think that's illegal.

**Sven Großmann:** Yeah. No, definitely. But definitely doing that.

**Mat Ryer:** All right. So then inadvertently, I need, I'm curious, is this how most hackathon projects start? Something absurd like this that then turns into a real idea?

**Sven Großmann:** Yeah, definitely. I think so. I mean, it sounds like a fun project to do, right? Because, I mean, the chess community is big. And why not just observe things that you normally don't observe?

**Mat Ryer:** How would you go about picking? And this is for everyone. This isn't just Sven. But like pick your, who would you pick as your team? Let's say you had this idea. Or I guess the, you know, the handful of us here. What would happen next? If you were, if this is a hackathon project. Yeah. You've got to find someone interested. How do you do that? Because we have an internal Slack channel called Hackathon. But that channel doesn't, not many people posted in there sometimes. But it must happen organically than that, doesn't it? How do you join a team? How do you find out about teams for hackathon?

**Sven Großmann:** I think it's sometimes a good mix of just, like, you know, you have a draft idea of a team and, you know, I don't know, I need someone who's good at front end or something like that and then you ask your friends, your colleagues, or I mean for chess, you can just ask in the chess channel, I'm sure there's one. Because it's also a good opportunity to get to know more people.

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Yeah. I was like that when you work on a project with people you've never worked with before.

**Matt Toback:** And honestly, wonder if one of the times we do it, that could be a rule. Because it is very different. It's harder in some ways, because you don't know the people. But it's a great way to also meet people that you haven't worked with before and also just have completely fresh perspective on an idea.

**Lukasz Gut:** I think this is one of the greatest things about hackathons here at Grafana that you actually go outside of your bubble and have the opportunity to work with other amazing people. And the truth is, we have so many here at the company that, yeah, it's just a real pleasure, right? And normally, without the hackathon, it's not so easy to get alignment across multiple teams, possibly working on something, definitely not, you know, you usually don't have time for much experimenting if there is no real commitment to the project. So this hackathon week gives really great flexibility, I think, to engineers just to get to know each other and also see what are the strengths of other people across the company. This is really amazing.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. And a lot of times I've worked with people in the hackathon for the first time and then later I have worked with them for real. Is it different? You do get a big, there's a big head start you have. Because the hackathon's quite intense, depends on where you are. But I go camping when I do mine. And these are like, yes, it's like a week. I always go, like I'll take work in the whole week usually. And sometimes there's a weekend attached as well. So it does tend to be kind of all on intense kind of thing. And that can be quite a bonding experience because you feel that you've survived something together that's like a bit more intense. It doesn't have to be like that, by the way. Like, it's like that because you want it to be because you're interested in it's fun.

[00:10:03]

There's no culture or even mandate or anything that suggests that you have to do anything like that. But you are free to do whatever you want in the hackathon, which is kind of part of the appeal, isn't it?

**Matt Toback:** I also love the idea that you join someone. You're like, hey, I'm thinking about this idea. You want to join my team? And they're like, cool, let's do it. And then three days later, you knock at their door with like a tent in hand. And you're like, all right, moving in for the weekend. They're like, oh, it's, yeah.

**Lukasz Gut:** This is actually the last missing part of our hackathons. We actually should get a proper budget either to meet with other Grafanistas. Maybe we try to have a team assemble with local Grafanistas. And you actually go and hang out together for like a week as you would do in a regular hackathon. These are so much fun. And I remember when I was back at university, we took every opportunity with my friends to join hackathons. We would travel across Poland to multiple cities, you know, take pizza, energy drinks, and just sleep on the floor, and just hack, or sometimes not sleep. The hackathon is like 48 hours. Yeah. You can do it. We did it. So this is I think the last missing piece here at Grafana, which we can improve.

**Mat Ryer:** Have you done anyone, I guess anyone here, has anyone done the equivalent of a hackathon for something that wasn't work related with friends or otherwise?

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** Yeah.

**Mat Ryer:** Alexa, what was that?

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** Yeah. I'm originally from Colombia, so I used to live in Medellin, and this is kind of like the tech, huge thing there. And there was an event, or several events that they called Startup Weekend. So you just go there, I went as an engineer, but of course I didn't have any team, anyone. And then there are people who has ideas and they pitch the ideas and then you just join them for the weekend. And indeed you spend almost a whole day, part of the night, go home and sleep next day early. And the idea is at the end,

[00:12:03]

you have sort of a prototype, and also you pitch the idea, you win prizes. But you don't know, this is like completely, people from different backgrounds, marketers, book owners, engineers.

**Mat Ryer:** Oh, wow.

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** Everyone is there. It was a really nice experience because it's just fun. It's just like, let's just build something. And also you know people and they're like really cool people there. So it's quite nice to speak to me.

**Mat Ryer:** What did you make?

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** In our case, we make a platform, I still remember for creators. So it was like people who, let's say that you have a band or you are a painter. So we wanted to make a platform for creators to pitch their services there for free. So it's just like, put everything there. And if you want to find an artist, you could just go there and do it. So we kind of like call different artists on different people. And we created some prototype that we can for that.

**Mat Ryer:** Oh, it's cool.

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** And also we had, because I think the event was organized by people who were from a startup world. So they were giving us harsh feedback.

**Mat Ryer:** Wow.

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** And it was like, you are iterating. And they were like crushing your idea in front of you. So that was quite good. Like in the classic startup way, saying like, how is this going to scale? Like, how are you going to make money? What is your model thing, business model? This doesn't scale. This doesn't make money. It's like, it was quite intense. But it was nice, because somehow you know that they are helping you. So it's not that they want to crush your ideas. They just like want to help you into that mindset.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah.

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** So it was quite cool.

**Matt Toback:** You know, and actually before you get much further, I do want to call out one thing for this interview that, or this whole panelist is, Mat, you are not just a presenter. You are also a participant in the hackathons. And you happen to be a participant in one of the hackathons that Sven was in. And I think you have a conflict of interest here and you have to decide who you're going to be today.

**Mat Ryer:** All right. I'll be Captain Jack Sparrow. He has no...

**Matt Toback:** Captain Jack has no skin in this game.

[00:14:05]

**Mat Ryer:** He's neither on hackathon teams nor hosting a podcast as far as I know.

**Matt Toback:** Has your Captain Jack Sparrow impression made an appearance on this podcast yet?

**Mat Ryer:** No, I don't think so. And I wasn't going to crowbar it in. But that's sort of perfect. Isn't it? Right? So you could have picked Jonathan as well, right? Has Jonathan made an experience?

**Matt Toback:** Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how well-known Jonathan is. We can explain who Jonathan is. Well, actually, can we come back to that and can someone remind? Because I have a couple questions. Jonathan plays into it. But I want to ask, and Mat, that maybe as a participant in the hackathons as well. So there is this thing at the beginning where you have an idea and you have to communicate it to this smaller group of this team to be able to get it across. What's that like? Because there's all these different, it feels like there's a lot of building. But there's also a lot of communicating kind of like what you can accomplish in a week. So I guess individually, not like specifically how do you do it. But how do you think about that? When you have the idea and when you're trying to assemble a group, how do you communicate that idea to a small group or get people bought in?

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, well, I think Mat, the thing about this is, you know, you've got to remember, these projects, savvy, you've got to be able to explain them quickly, Mat. You haven't got time when you're out on the high seas. Also, the wind is cold and it's loud out there, Mat. No, but I mean that, like, you, an idea, you ought to be able to succinctly explain it to someone. Like, and that part of that, part of like thinking about what the project is, is part of that. So if it's a great idea, but you can't quite articulate it, you haven't quite thought it through or you're going to need to hack on it more to figure out what it is, but you've got a sort of idea of something in that area. That's a lot more difficult to sell to somebody than just something simple like, yeah, we're going to put a new button on a panel.

[00:16:05]

And when you click it, it orders a t-shirt with that panel printed on it at that time. So you can have if you don't like that, I get that generating bot.

**Matt Toback:** I would do that. Oh, I'm in that project.

**Mat Ryer:** I would do that. There you go. For example, so it's like, yeah, panels on t-shirts. You can just say like that, and people don't know what it is. So for other folks as well, what did one of your projects sound like at the beginning versus what did it grow into if you recall?

**Lukasz Gut:** So for me, it definitely starts a way earlier than the hackathon. For the last hackathon, the last project, which I think we're going to have a chance to talk about later as well. The idea actually popped into my mind a few months earlier when I was reading some materials on what an agent or an LLM agent or LLM based agent actually is. And I remember I was reading some sort of a blog post that would explain how to build one in Go in particular. And I remember reading it and being like, it can't be this simple. It can't be a for loop with a bunch of, you know, marshaling and unmarshaling and calling functions. And then it turned out it actually is that simple because I read a few more blog posts. I put together quickly a prototype, and indeed it was. And then I remember we had an offsite with my team in Barcelona. And I just went ahead and started pitching this idea that I had this time around for what later became an agentic monitoring project for the hackathon. So I remember trying to pitch the idea from a couple of different angles and see how different people react to it.

[00:18:06]

And when I actually found the angle that gets people excited, I came back from the offsite to my home office. I wrote down like a very quick product in a just couple of paragraphs. So there is something to share with the people. And then just before the hackathon, like a week before the hackathon, I started sharing this. I said, I have this idea. If nobody wants to join, I'm going to do it anyway. If anyone can come along for the ride, please, here it is. This is what we are going to be building. And I did it like twice or three times already, kind of this loop where I go, I start to pitch something, and then when I see some sort of saturation that people are excited about a particular angle at the problem, I go, I try to write this down so I can have some artifact that I share with everyone. And it makes it so much easier to align on day zero of the hackathon and also later lead it because there is some for the given into the idea prior to the actual hacking with starting.

**Matt Toback:** And I imagine that's also giving you some signal as to what resonates and if it immediately, if someone else immediately grabs onto it, it gives it, it validates it along the way.

**Lukasz Gut:** Yeah, exactly. And because, well, a week might seem like a lot of time. But if you are going a name or something ambitious, it's really not, right? So you want to get at least this fuzziness about your idea out of the way and have it sorted prior to the hackathon, right? You still need a little bit of ideation and detailing what you're actually going to build and what's achievable in a week, this depends on the team you've gathered, right? Maybe you're solo or two people or maybe actually gathered a fully fledged five-person team. But yeah, once you have this, this product, the N.A. before starting the hackathon, the zero just becomes so much easier.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, a few times, that's how it's happened for us,

[00:20:06]

where we kind of are thinking about this ahead of time. And you have some time to talk about it and think about it. There was one time I joined the team and I think we called it like alert insights and our original idea was just going to be to sort of enrich alerts as they get fired as they're fired. And we have pivoted into a runbook kind of project. So that was the case of one where what we thought we were going to do at the beginning changed dramatically once we got on the call altogether to sort of start to chat through it. And Matt, your point is good. Like yes, you get validation when there's people who like ideas. I think also you get the same signal if it's not resonating, if it's not sticking. You're either it's not thought through enough or you haven't explained it properly or something. So having like a group is a great sanity check there. And that's why having diverse, having some diversity in that team as well as people who work on different things or have different experiences that also helps because you're more likely to get projects that are going to resonate with more people. But yeah, that is very fun. I always wonder how much work it's okay to do ahead of time. You know, I know that some people yeah, like I think like in a way, we try and stick to sort of the main rules where you're really only building in that week. And but actually copying other projects like some cheating in that sense of like copying a project that you saw last time and doing a different take on it or you know that someone else is working on a project and then you might want to do an alternative version of that. That kind of stuff also I think is quite healthy and we should encourage it. It doesn't necessarily feel great if you lose to someone who's done the same project. You know, because that's tough, I guess. But for the kind of for the group here, you've done these projects. What are your have you had have you said no to things because it fell outside of the moral boundaries of the hackathon

[00:22:06]

or ethical boundaries to where you're like oh no, I can't use that or I can't continue that project or just something to where you're like no, it's you know, I might work on it separately but it doesn't fit a hackathon.

**Sven Großmann:** I think the only thing for me really was two hackathons ago where I was already part of one team and I was afraid of joining a second team because like taking part in two teams in hackathon fits wrong for several reasons but I like in the end I think both projects are quite good. So yeah.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, the bird one didn't they?

**Sven Großmann:** Yeah.

**Mat Ryer:** Did you contribute equally to both?

**Sven Großmann:** Yeah. Kind of.

**Mat Ryer:** Did both teams know that you're on the other team that you're up to the finals? It's like Mrs. Doubtfire and dresses as an old lady for one of the teams. Hello, I had a mustache wearing a mustache.

**Sven Großmann:** Yeah. Is it this Sven or oh, it's a— Yeah. It's exactly.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, it was also working for a few North Korean companies at the same reach.

**Sven Großmann:** I told you not to say that.

**Mat Ryer:** I'm sorry. Well, yeah but that's another thing that's quite funny it's like how much you can get done really in that week, how you can contribute. For one project, I'd done like a few in my spare time, just hacked on some versions of this idea. But none of that code was used. That was just that they're hacking and playing around with it. The team picked up completely different text, I kind of started again. And the way I'd helped before by that thinking, but nothing was built in that week. So that felt okay. And also, the point is to do things that really move the needle. So we do need a bit of flexibility, I think, in that.

**Lukasz Gut:** I think there are multiple reasons joining the hackathon, right? I mean, you can do it just for winning or you can do it to innovate or you can do it to learn

[00:24:11]

stuff or the other reasons. And all these different reasons also shape the way how you do the hackathon, I think. How competitive do you want to do it?

**Mat Ryer:** It's true that you can choose that really. Because there is a prize, a friend who doesn't know, it's like a decent prize for winning. And I think the first, second, and third places get prizes, don't they? You know, so did you get two prizes, Sven, when you enter two teams and you won twice?

**Sven Großmann:** I'm not sure if I'm allowed to talk about that.

**Mat Ryer:** Right, you got two prizes. Cool, yeah.

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** Alexa, would you say? I want to also to say that sometimes, because I have participated in different hackathons during, like, over the years in Grafana, but these hackathons found me in a weird way, because the hackathon was born to solve a problem. So they, and I saw that problem in two different places from two different people, and they were like not related. One was about, like, someone trying to detect how many panels were broken in their dashboard, but they had, like, they created their own script to, like, you know, scan the dashboard and do all of these things. And there was a lot of complexity there, and then the result was like, they couldn't actually map the panel and the dashboard. It was because they were outside of Grafana, so it was not internal. And then I went into the list of ideas, and then I saw this repair hackathon idea. And the problem was also from someone who is working in Grafana, and they had the same problem as this external person, and the same thing, but then it was kind of like mapping in one channel or Slack channel. I was like, oh, yeah, you need to fix this in dashboard. Can you create some feature? And in the hackathon was like, internally, we are also experiencing the same. Can we create something around this? And for me,

[00:26:13]

I was like, okay, this is matching. I think this is really a good opportunity to just explore what can we do in a week for that. So I joined the team that I didn't know, like, Marick, the developer advocate, and the increase who was in a different department than me, never worked with them before. So it was quite interesting.

**Mat Ryer:** That's so cool that you picked a problem that you saw for real, and that I think is something that the hackathon gives us, because that knowledge is spread everywhere. Everyone has different experience, and they have different insights into different bits of things. And, you know, we all try and kind of have some contact with customers, so we have an idea of what people are doing and users, you know. And yeah, I think that's it. It's like the inspiration to want to solve a problem that you've seen, and then having the opportunity at the next hackathon. It's only over a couple of months away, really. It was a week away.

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** That was interesting. Literally, they put the problem on Friday, and next week was hackathon, and someone else put that idea. I was like, oh, this looks like faith. Let's just join. Why not?

**Mat Ryer:** And how did you do? How did you do in the hackathon?

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** It was interesting, because first, well, we were like few people, three people. So we didn't have a lot of time, because also, I think all of us had four days, instead of the whole week, we were like time off and stuff. We never worked together, so we had to do that bonding really fast. So, you know, like putting quick things and trying to define this scope, because it was so ambitious, and we wanted to do so many things that we needed to nail down what exactly we can achieve in a week. So it went pretty well when we defined this is the MVP. But at the end, I think like when we created the video, like there was one thing that I was not able to achieve. Like there was one call that I was not able to make, to make it work as we

[00:28:20]

were envisioning, but we send a video like that. And next day, I couldn't let go. I was like, no, let me just let two, three hours, and then I was able to do it. And it felt really nice, because the MVP was what we expected. Like we were identifying the broken panels, and I was like, oh, yes, this is going to be useful for the future me and the future teams. And yeah, so it was quite nice.

**Mat Ryer:** What's happened since then?

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** A lot of people joined the channel and asked, so what is the plan for the future? And also one thing our project did, and it's talking about reusing what other people have done in the past, we integrated the dashboard linter open source project into our hackathon. Like this is a CLI tool, but it's not integrated currently in Grafana. And the idea is like, you have Prometheus and Loki and other queries, and you can like see if they are following best practices. Interestingly, it was not integrated in Grafana, so I was like, oh, this is a quick win, just like call the service, and then show that. So there were people suggesting like, oh, you should go and talk about this hackathon, about this project linter in a meetup. So there were like a lot of like, can you do something about it? And the answer is like, yes, but of course, everything is about priorities. We all have different teams, and we need to make sure that if we want to push this forward, need to be aligned with the right department, the right team. And at any one point, it will go into our team and into our department, because yeah, I mean the Grafana dashboard sharing. So yeah, it will go into our scope.

[00:30:03]

**Mat Ryer:** Not sure when, hopefully soon, because yeah, but you again, you get that quick win, like you say. So yeah, that's the other thing. If you work, sometimes you end up on teams working on projects that are quite big, and they take a long time before you can ship things, obviously you might still be doing that iteratively. But there's something also nice about a quick beginning middle end project, which you can wrap up and deliver something.

And that's why with since Cursor, another AI kind of assistant tools, I've seen a lot of hackathons are now working software, whereas before we used to have more slides and just like a hack together prototype, you can actually ship working features. I saw some people just build a feature, something that they've just wanted to build for a while and haven't had the opportunity to, they just build a feature and it's a PR. And in that case, it's a kind of review and happy to maintain it. And then why not merge it?

So yeah, but it gives you that satisfaction, doesn't it? So what's the general feeling in this room is building it as a feature? Is that better? Does that make everything better because it's more real and it speeds along that development? Or is it constricted somehow because now the expectation is that has to be fully functional?

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** In my case, I don't take any of the code of hackathon as a feature ready. Like that slows down my way of working. If I am in hackathon mode, I will just go and explore as many ways as I can to just deliver something. And then if this is something that is valuable, I will spend time in to make it like feature ready. So I frequently don't go into that direction.

However, I must say that in this hackathon because I was using, I don't use Cursor but I use Claude Code, the CLI one. And for me, that's the perfect companion because my editor is not VS Code, it's Vim. So with Claude Code on Vim, it was like really, really good.

[00:32:06]

So the plugin application that I created, it's missing unit tests, but it's actually generating good enough code that I could go now and see like, okay, we need to refactor things here and there, but it was working and it was like nice. So and I'm not a plugin developer expert, I work primarily in dashboards. So that was quite amazing to see that like speed. In the past, I would spend a lot of time even trying to see how I create a plugin, scenes plugin application with all of these things here was like easy. So that was good.

**Matt Toback:** It does. It feels like it's like writing a treatment for like a movie or a book or something and you don't have to have everything fully like the visual effects fully done. You're just like, yeah, monster destroys building here and you skip past it because you're like, that's if it's going to work, we'll build it later.

**Lukasz Gut:** I think agentic tools, they make it so much fun and so much more competitive. I mean, the hackathons. I remember when I was still a freshman at university, I think this was the very first hackathon we joined. It was a 24 hour one and it wasn't also kind of a general category. So there were many different ideas from many different domains and I remember we really wanted to have something up and running and so we obviously didn't sleep for 24 hours.

We built, I think at that point, it was some sort of application that like a mobile application where you could kind of import and trade coupons, like coupons for grocery stores, right? Because maybe you had a bunch of coupons lying around in your wallet, so you could have it uploaded and kind of traded with other people because maybe you don't need coupons for this particular shop, but maybe for some vehicles, right?

And I remember we had literally a mobile app up and running

[00:34:06]

at the time Flutter was called, we built it in Flutter. I don't know why. And then it came up to the judges, right? Everyone had their own presentation at the end. I think two, three minutes to pitch their idea, right? We obviously prepared the presentation, pitched the idea, had even a little demo that kind of the app was working, working.

And then we felt so devastated when we learned. It was also the first hackathon, but when we learned that the team that actually won the hackathon didn't have any working software. They didn't even start, they didn't even create a repo. They just created the presentation in a couple of hours, went home, went to sleep, came back outside, right? And presented it. And so this is where I learned, okay, hackathons are not about code. They are about pitching the idea.

And I think the dynamics are shifting these days, which for me as an engineer, it makes me very excited. I think I'm the most excited about hackathons this time around than I have ever been, because you can just ship so much software in a week. And the hackathon software is supposed to be scrappy, right? I sometimes call it, you know, hackathon level software. It's not even experimental, right? It's supposed to be scrappy. You throw anything at the wall, right? And then whatever sticks, it's good enough. And I think Claude Code or Cursor or other tools like this are really tremendous for this type of experimentation exploration.

**Matt Toback:** Alexa, are you talking about the weekend or the week that you participated in the weekend and Lukasz?

I feel excited. It's like this level of excitement for almost anything that's different than a hackathon than it is if you were trying to build something earnestly. Like, if you were to come to me and we're like, yeah, I'm thinking about building this coupon swapping app, you know, it's going to be my next company. I'm raising some money. I'd

[00:36:09]

be like, oh, all right, like is that a good idea? Is it not? But as a hackathon, I'm like, yeah, go for it, right? Like, yeah, if you got pampers and you have, you know, whatever, a coupon for this, like, swap it. It feels like a level. It feels like you can kind of buy into almost anything as possible. And the stakes don't have to be immensely high, which also feels like kind of keep generating and going in different directions.

**Lukasz Gut:** Yeah, because the commitment is also quite small. It's just a week. So it's not like, yeah, so the bets are small, which allows you to make lots of them.

**Mat Ryer:** There is something about you need that freedom to not ship anything. I personally like working software like that. I think that sort of point of what we're doing. So I always want that to be what I ship in my hackathon project. I think you got to put the sign on the door. You got to say, what kind of hackathon is this? Is this the kind of hackathon that you're allowed to just put up four slides that pitch is the art of the possible or does it have to be something? And in here, for us, it has to be something.

I don't see it. I mean, whether or not it's written in the rules. Projects that don't produce anything don't really get very far because there's just so many people that are producing and communicating, which feels really good. Self-policing in a way.

Yeah, but you need, yeah, but you do need the freedom for it to not be anything like it has to be completely free to be anything because then people will get really creative. And I don't know if we've had, I know we've had some projects that are they are just like science fair projects that people build in their houses, like physically, they build little hackathon projects like that as well. But usually, yeah, they are a Grafana feature or a new idea or something.

But a few times, Sven and I actually, we did all right on hackathons before, but one time I did a hackathon, which was the taking Toback's ideas around the drill down metrics kind of idea and then did one with Cyril on logs because Cyril knows the Loki backend in and out and was able to build what it needed in order to actually work.

[00:38:12]

And that became then squad, like a squad gets built around that project. Same thing happened for the assistant project that started as a hackathon project. That in a week was fully working and it's not, it's nowhere near as good as it is now after we've done so much more work on it. But the, there's something about the first version, it just has to be good enough, it just has to be a little bit better than what you had without it and then it's valuable.

And I think hackathon teaches us that a bit. It's like you can deliver a small bit of value and it doesn't have to be fully fleshed out or fully realized. And that's how I like to work anyway of like, you know, my first versions of things, they are kind of hackathon quality PRs, usually scope is way cut down. So it's not, it's not trying to do too much like it tries to really focus on something.

That's a kind of nice thing and hackathons great for that because you really just doing a five-minute pitch, that's all you can do.

**Lukasz Gut:** And I think you touched on something really important here, which is you mentioned two hackathon projects in which you took part personally, right? And then they actually made it to the product. I think this is a big part of what makes Grafana hackathons really successful. And also why engineers across the board are just super excited because they know that if they build something or maybe I won't speak for anyone, it is definitely something that keeps fire within me. That I know that if I build something cool for the hackathon, it usually doesn't even matter if you win because there is just so many projects and the bar honestly is so high for the internal hackathon that it's not always about winning.

But the fact that if a project is good enough gets enough recognition that you will actually get a shot and can build it into like a fully fledged product or maybe something smaller than into

[00:40:16]

into a feature. And yeah, there are just so many examples of these projects that I see shipped. I think drill-down apps is probably the most remarkable one because for me personally, it's changed just the way I use Grafana at all. I very rarely go into the OG Explorer panel at this point. So that's really amazing to see.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, that's great to hear. That's very nice. And honestly, it took people working on it that they don't work on that problem in their normal day-to-day. Like the hackathon team weren't people from Loki or from the other front-ends for these databases, they were kind of outsiders. And they really, the ignorance that we had, which is sometimes useful by the way. Everyone always wants to know everything. Genuinely, having some ignorance about something, I think you should be comfortable with that.

**Sven Großmann:** Yeah, genuinely. I was working on the log squad just before you and also after that hackathon. And we had some projects, like several projects where we really planned out something like that, an application just for Loki. Together with other Loki engineers and like PMs and all that. And we thought for months and then basically all it needed was just one week of people doing it. And that's so helpful sometimes.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. And it's no, it's no criticism because the thing is you get into a proper, like in order to deliver software and have it maintained and be able to actually support customers. You have to be able to like build things in a sustainable way. And like you're always dealing with real customer requests. There's like a lot of real things in your day job that mean you can't do that. And that's the other thing the hackathons give you is a break from that so that you can just take a step back.

Well, and we came in very ignorant and we were like, instead of the user writes a query and then you run it on Loki, why don't we just write all the queries and run them all

[00:42:19]

and just show you everything. And then that's like a high level overview and you can drill in from there. If we pitched that to the Loki team that you know, they spend so much time looking after the numbers of like the margins matter that scale because it's enormous, Loki. So they spend a lot of their energy making it very efficient. So the idea that you could, these cowboys just come along and they've got this app that essentially DDoSes their service.

And I think in another company that would have been shut down, but here the attitude is like they took it like, okay, here's a challenge. This is allow a new way. People seem to like this. We're going to have to step up to the challenge here and figure out how to enable that at scale. And then you know, you're talking like serious engineering that then goes into solving some of those problems. And it just started with a different user experience in a hackathon project.

So it's really a powerful and exciting and they can have that impact. I can see why hackathons take part. I think even if there were no prizes, we would still be as popular.

**Lukasz Gut:** I can go even as that further. I was actually hired into Grafana because of hackathon project. Like the what we call today k6 example integration or the way to correlate between performance load tests that are running with k6 and then that you can basically correlate end to end the entire flow due to Tempo and due to traces was actually started as a hackathon project. At this point, probably like four or five years ago, it didn't win. I don't think it got too far. It was kind of parked for some time and then revived and then actually I was hired. So hackathons really do have an impact.

**Matt Toback:** So are you saying that you snuck in to Grafana as a hackathon participant. You were not employed by Grafana and eventually you're hired because...

**Lukasz Gut:** It was a colleague of mine. It was Daniel from the k6 team who I think

[00:44:27]

started and kicked this off in the hackathon initially, right? And then they actually decided to prioritize it and build a team around this. So I was first hired just as a single person to deliver this and ship it. Then we hired another person, then we hired an intern. We shipped it. Obviously, other bunch of stuff happened, but this is kind of the way I got into Grafana. So it's actually because of a hackathon project becoming a production one.

**Matt Toback:** I do want to do it before we run out of time. I want to talk about Lukasz, you're talking about this with the college hackathon and this comes up a lot and this idea around communication, communicating the ideas, the way it's presented, and even Mat, I like how you talked about that sometimes it's self-evident and sometimes the feature itself is doing the communicating for you. Sometimes it's maybe less clear and you have to communicate it.

Just talking about that approach because it's so important. And I hear sometimes too, like people grumpy that they built something, they did a terrible job explaining it and then they're grumpy that it didn't get the praise that it deserved. But then the ideas never got put across or it never highlighted what it was intending to do. How much weight in that week do you put on crafting the story, telling the value, blah, blah, blah, blah.

**Lukasz Gut:** So I mentioned earlier that I really hated the fact that hackathons in the past used to be almost 100% shifted towards focusing on the communication part. But the reality is that I still do put a lot of weight on the communication. Our hackathons are usually a week. Now I think they tend to start before the weekend and they go over the weekend and I think they end some time like late first day or something.

So for me, we usually are for my teams. I lead I think three or four hackathons until the last time. What we usually do is we take the last two days and allocate at least two people

[00:46:33]

to work on the presentation. I think it's also really wonderful that we have strict time on the presentation. So for people who don't know it's five minutes. So everyone has basically like a time slot of five minutes where which they can use however they want. They can some people create like fully-fledged videos like YouTube level videos with b-rolls, etc. Some people just sit down in front of a webcam and just talk through a presentation. Some people literally sit down and all they do is just present. So it's up to whoever is leading the project.

But yet in my case, I usually tend to allocate around two days because we always went for like a fully-fledged video. Because this is something that I also find as a nice artifact. I can get I can let go and I know even show it to my girlfriend or my mom. Hey, look, I build this cool thingy. I actually can build stuff, right? So yeah, I do put a lot of weight on it.

**Matt Toback:** And I'm glad you I'm glad you call that out because the when I say communication, I don't mean like video production quality. It is just can you can you articulate the idea and what it's intending to do and what's really cool and exceptional about it. And I do think that's the communication part. It's not it's not the b-roll. Sometimes it's helpful. If that propels the idea, amazing. But it's yeah, there were hackathons who use I mean, where the video wasn't super flashy.

**Lukasz Gut:** Yeah, yeah. And that makes me happy. It makes me and I think it's also been said explicitly that the video quality is not as important. I think probably still implicitly within to bias towards certain things. But I generally do feel like it's not the thing judges hope we saw.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, because it used to be there are some people that make the videos are so good that you think what's the point of doing it if it looks like I can't make it that good. I don't know

[00:48:34]

just someone in Grafana used to just be a professional video editor. That was their job before. Their videos are amazing. So but yeah, you kind of then forced to do something different. You forced to kind of get creative to stand out in a different way. And I think that's also very healthy.

But we certainly yeah, we used to put a lot more weight on what the actual presentation was. And now it is more about you've just got to communicate it. It doesn't have to be yeah, like some crazy production. Although there's some great ones. And I do hope, Matt, I hope we can share some more publicly. Yeah, because some of them I think just fantastic. Some of the work people do.

**Lukasz Gut:** And I think that's also good to good motivation to do a good video because I think at least in the last two years at GrafanaCon, they always showed like the last hackathon winner on stage, the recording of that video.

**Sven Großmann:** Yeah, that was even handed in. So it was like super real, but then also a good motivation to do a funny and a good recording.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, yeah. When you see a hackathon video played live in front of a real audience and this gets laughs, you know, the bits where they think others are back to Jonathan. The audience actually laughing though in real life is yeah, that's just great. Like that's worth putting some jokes in your video. And yeah, the audience is so friendly as well, so they're ready for it.

**Lukasz Gut:** So it's the first three.

**Mat Ryer:** But yeah, that is very good. Lukasz, you even show yours to your mom, but you just want to check your mom doesn't work for Datadog, does she?

**Lukasz Gut:** No, not that I'm aware of. My grandma. Splunk.

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** Actually, one of the hackathon videos I shared to my friends because it was quite creative. Literally, I use, you know, like toys and the toys and also like paper

[00:50:36]

to put graphics and stuff. It was quite like interesting. I had a lot of fun doing that one.

**Matt Toback:** Which project was that?

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** I don't know if I can mention that one because we didn't share. It was more like to see if we could create some auto migration tool. Okay. From one specific, like, you know, open source tool to Grafana. So I don't think I will mention because I remember that we said I don't know, I will not continue that way. But it was quite fun to do that one.

And one thing that in my case, I always put for the videos is storytelling. Like, why I would see a video if it's not something that it will tell me something. And data is perfect. Like, you know, I can tell you like, oh, yes, X amount of customers have this specific problem. And that becomes too heavy if you are watching so many of these videos. And from my point of view, what I really like is just to tell the story of, okay, this idea came from this problem. And this problem has a face, like someone who is struggling because in real life, literally someone is struggling whatever we are trying to solve. So for me, I really like the storytelling part.

And then for the production, I'm not a videographer, whatever. But sometimes when I have the time for producing the video, I really like to just play with that the last day. And if I don't have the time, like, we just do something simpler. This time, actually, was really nice because Marie did a lot in the whole production. And she was really amazing the way that she just plays it. We did a lot of brainstorming. Since day one, what exactly did we want to scope for the end product? And what will be the story that we will tell at the end in that video? So it started early on because well, we cannot show something that we cannot build. So that was our goal.

[00:52:38]

**Matt Toback:** That video stood out though. The one with the cutouts and the cartoons and stuff. Like, yeah, that's it. You've got to do something different.

**Mat Ryer:** I have to go find that now. I think I missed that. I think it was. That's what I mean. We should, well, if we can share them, we should for sure. At least internally.

**Matt Toback:** Yeah, I want to set up something that just posts one a week. It's just like, or yeah, just hackathon video.

**Sven Großmann:** Hackathon movie nights.

**Matt Toback:** Yeah.

**Mat Ryer:** Well, we do that, by the way. I get together with a group of people in an evening. And we watch loads of hack. We watch like all the final hackathon, all the finalists.

**Matt Toback:** Oh, you do that locally.

**Mat Ryer:** No, no, I do it on, it's virtual. But the other people are all over the world.

**Matt Toback:** But do you just want to see yourself? Just watch your hackathon.

**Mat Ryer:** No, no. I'm sick of tired of the look of my face by the end of editing the video. I don't like the look of my own face anyway. So making you have to look at that again and again, while you're doing it, torture.

**Matt Toback:** Don't touch it for me. Everyone else is, everyone else is lucky.

**Mat Ryer:** But for me, the other thing I was that I wanted to talk about was we started here. And maybe this is a good, this is a good, you know, end capping, but birds. So we're talking about, you know, users, the face of users, solving a world problem, building software. And then you, then you have every hackathon, there's at least a couple that just, just does something that it really has nothing to do with anything. And I find it's like the most fantastic projects. So talk to me about birds.

**Sven Großmann:** I mean, I think, so let me talk about the reason. I think Grafana is just used for all these kinds of things, right? I mean, we see every year GrafanaCon, yeah, how people land stuff on the moon or whatever, whatever they used Grafana for. So I think it's totally valid reason to work. I'm Grafana and I love to do it in hackathons. Mostly to learn about stuff.

So I mean, the last hackathon, I bet was bird, bird straight on was trying to, to do a drill down the app just,

[00:54:44]

just for birds, but under the hood using a feature that was released in Grafana 12 or, you know, maybe using Grafana app platform that's kind of a new way of, of building plugins and apps. And I didn't know how to do it. So I was very curious to figure out use for my data. I have like data about birds because that's not something artificial. That's something I like to see in my dashboards. Why not use that as a reason to build a plugin or build a new app?

**Matt Toback:** That's a great, it's a great point. I think people's curiosity, technical curiosity drives a lot of choices too. It's like, I don't know, I just want to build this. I think a lot of AI agentic projects in the last hackathon were kind of came from that where people want to know, yeah, you look into what, what does it take to be agentic? Like you said, Lukasz, for loops are back.

**Lukasz Gut:** For loops now. They've never been so exciting.

**Matt Toback:** Yeah. So I also think something that's really, really good here is, I mean, we all also use our products, use Grafana and all our databases, nearly in our day job. So we have a good, like we can think very well about like new features on new products or how to use something in a different way and just do it and try it out.

**Sven Großmann:** I was working at a company before Grafana and we built submarines. So it was very hard for me to just ideate or experiment on submarines.

**Matt Toback:** So yeah, you can't, you don't see many birds.

**Sven Großmann:** Yeah, that's, yeah, fish.

**Matt Toback:** Or maybe there's something that was also a Fish Span, which is the second version of Wingspan that just came out.

**Mat Ryer:** Oh, did you, did you use Grafana at the submarine? Did you company, did you say?

**Sven Großmann:** No, no, really, no.

**Mat Ryer:** But yeah, you do get some fish that have wings, don't you? Flying?

**Sven Großmann:** Flying fish.

**Mat Ryer:** Flying fish. That's why it was cool. Did you?

**Sven Großmann:** Right.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, real. Honestly, yeah, birds are not real, but flying fish are, how, how did it sound?

[00:56:50]

**Sven Großmann:** It sounded flappy. And it was, it was probably about six or eight and we're out in a boat and you just, and you just seem to go, that was cool. It was super cool. It was pretty.

**Matt Toback:** Did you, did the bird project give you any new perspective on your personal stance on whether birds are real?

**Sven Großmann:** I don't know if that can, isn't any direction, but not really in a good direction, because we had a lot of AI and I think the AI was hallucinating a lot.

**Mat Ryer:** I think they, there's a play on that thing. Yeah.

**Sven Großmann:** Well, they evolved that. It's just like a loop.

**Mat Ryer:** Well, I heard they were dinosaurs that evolved into birds. So if you trace them back, they come from dinosaurs. So maybe they go back to dinosaurs as well.

**Sven Großmann:** Yeah.

**Mat Ryer:** I can't wait for that. That will really just follow up again. That will really spice up the London marathon. I think I'll watch when that's happened.

**Lukasz Gut:** I will just plug in a little conspiracy theory. Oh, because it's, conspiracy, conspiracy, conspiracy, conspiracy.

**Mat Ryer:** That'd be so excited, Matt, because it's about you.

**Lukasz Gut:** There is strange interest in things that don't exist across SLT in Grafana. So Mat here believes that fish or sorry birds, birds don't exist, right?

**Mat Ryer:** Actually, I'm skeptical about Australia.

**Lukasz Gut:** Yeah. There is something fishy going on because Pavo from k6, he's also skeptical if beavers exist. And this will be one of the very first things I learned. When I joined Grafana, like three years ago, we go to an offsite and he's like, have you seen beavers man? Like in real life?

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. Hey, do you?

**Lukasz Gut:** No, but we also have people that work in Brazil.

**Mat Ryer:** Hold on, Matt, for your show off. But the fish are being chased by beavers.

**Sven Großmann:** Yeah.

**Mat Ryer:** But they're flapping? How did they sound?

**Sven Großmann:** Well, it's like, it's a flap, but the fish have a flap.

**Mat Ryer:** I see. Well, we have the beavers

[00:58:55]

flap.

**Lukasz Gut:** I want some Brazilian people.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, go on. We can just have two concurrent podcasts.

**Sven Großmann:** I don't use them. No, I can't do it because it's good. I don't want to squeeze into anyone listening to me.

**Mat Ryer:** We've got a Brazilian. They'd never seen snow before. They're skeptical about snow. So that's quite a good one. Johnson. No, I can't relate. No, Jon Snow. They're believing Jon Snow.

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** Sorry, Alexa. I mean, I can't relate. When I am originally from Colombia, in Colombia, we don't have seasons. We don't have winter, summer, whatever. So we only have one t-shirt the whole year. And in Christmas, what we do is like, we decorate everything with fake snow, but it's not even ice. Is that kind of like, you know, the material that you used to cover the screens and stuff? So at some point when you're a kid, it's like, like, you see movies, but is it really? Oh, cool. Alexa is because I never see it.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, that's it. When I move to Europe, and I was like, oh, yeah, it's real.

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** I'm like that with sunshine.

[01:00:02]

**Mat Ryer:** When you say there's no seasons, when you watch Game of Thrones and Jon Snow is going like, "Winter is coming." Yeah. What do you think? You're like, well, you have to go on Wikipedia.

**Sven Großmann:** Yeah, probably. Who is he? Who's winter?

**Mat Ryer:** Jon Snow is that weatherman from Game of Thrones. He's always going on about the weather and he's like, "A band of low pressure's coming in from the east. So we're going to expect it's going to be very rainy, get your big coats on, the new jumpers, but it'll live up over the weekend. So enjoy your weekend, you bastards." But he's not a pirate.

**Matt Toback:** He's not a pirate.

**Mat Ryer:** No, that's yeah, I can really only do that one impression. It's Jack Sparrow and Jon Snow, basically. It's the same impression.

**Matt Toback:** Yeah. He's just it.

**Mat Ryer:** Well, that's all the time we have, I'm afraid. Well, thanks so much for joining us, everyone. This is really, really insightful. Quickly, what's your next thing you're going to hack on if you've got an idea? Alexa, do you have something else next?

**Alexa Vargas Ortega:** I think like in my team right now, we are working in a new project about saved queries, query library. So I really want to do something that is aligned with that project and connected with that project. So I'm already thinking, because it's a week that I can explore, right? So maybe it's just trying different things around integrating these two things and maybe moving that direction of hey, maybe this is a good idea if we want to promote that feature. That will be my thinking for now.

**Mat Ryer:** Nice. That sounds fun. What about you, Sven? Anything exciting coming up?

**Sven Großmann:** Well, I mean, at this point, it has to be fish out on, I guess.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. Dueling for fish.

**Matt Toback:** Yeah. It's like fracking. Fracking is the new fishing.

**Mat Ryer:** It's fracking real. I don't know. We might find out. Lukasz, what are you going to build next? What are you going to—

**Lukasz Gut:** I think we're actually going to iterate on the agentic monitoring idea. Just because the

[01:02:08]

landscape of tooling is changing quite rapidly. Like for example, I think a week after or two weeks after we wrapped up the hackathon project, Google has released their new conversational image segmentation with Gemini 2.5 and trying to figure out what buttons are on the screen of your web browser is one of the challenges we've been dealing with, right? And the regular element was surprisingly good at this, but the new capabilities, I think they throw it out of the window. And then we also actually didn't try like a real image model versus just using another where you can upload a screenshot of a browser. So I think we're going to take another stab at agentic monitoring. And also because we are not going to work on it in Q3, but we really want to work on it. And the earliest we will get a chance I believe is Q4. So I think a hackathon might be coming earlier. So it's our cheaty way to work on it a bit quicker.

**Mat Ryer:** Nice. Yeah, very exciting. That project was very cool as well. So great projects. Matt, are you ever going to take part in hackathon? Are you allowed to?

**Matt Toback:** I have taken— the thanks bot was a hackathon project.

**Mat Ryer:** Thanks bot. Do you know thanks bot?

**Matt Toback:** Yeah, you say thanks with it.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, you do because it saves you so you don't have to be polite as a human. You can outsource your politeness to a bot.

**Matt Toback:** It is a direct human question. No, I did do it with Ed and a couple of folks on the people team. But I was, yeah, it felt— I wanted to participate in it because it scratched the itch that I wanted to scratch. So I'll probably do it again.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, I hope you did too. And I hope

[01:04:10]

you listen again to our wonderful podcast, Grafana's Big Tent. Thanks so much for joining us everyone. We'll see you next time on Grafana's—

**Matt Toback:** No, there it is.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, on Grafana's Big Tent.