Joseph Eftekhari, Hanu Prateek Kunduru and Salim Salaues: Jeff-Tech
Jeff-Tech is heads-down integrating Zenko with the hot new file system, IPFS. By building a Zenko stack into IPFS, they will enable yet another venue for Zenko’s multi-cloud power—leveraging the peer-to-peer distributed file system across connected computers. Because IPFS enables distribution of parts of files across huge numbers of “peers” it enhances data durability—even making it immutable, according to the team. The Jeff-Tech team doesn’t have any members named Jeff…long story, but as you might guess, it has something to do team member Joseph Eftekhari’s name, and his being absent when the team chose the name. In addition to Joseph, the team’s two other members, Salim Salaues and Hanu Prateek Kunduru are all students at 42, living in the dorms.
Joseph is from Fresno, California, where he attended Fresno State and earned a B.S. in Communicative Disorders and Deaf Studies. After graduating, he worked in his field for a year, helping children with autism. He got the tech bug, though, so decided he wanted to join a tech company. He saw 42 as the perfect way to get there, and has been here for 10 months now. This is his third hackathon, if you count game jams as hackathons (and we do J).
Salim is from Los Angeles. He studied graphic design, but he pivoted to tech as he moved into the working world. He’s been an engineer for a drone startup, in addition to having held multiple sysadmin and network admin jobs. He joined 42 ten months ago to learn to program, and couldn’t be happier. In addition to studying here, he volunteers in the Bocal doing, guess what, systems and network administration. This is his second hackathon; his first, just two weeks ago, was a weekend-long web app development hackathon. That one, he said, gave him the confidence to do this one.
Hanu is originally from India, but has been here in the U.S. for one year. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and MBA with dual focus in Marketing and Finance. He ran a startup in India, and came to 42 after a successful exit…this is his post-exit break. He thought it would be a great way to formalize his skill set. Initially, he thought his time here would have been shorter, but he loves it, so he’s been here about a year, as one of the first student at 42 US. He also volunteers at 42, doing pedagogy and devops. Definitely becoming a serial hacker, he’s done five hackathons since his first in February—and he won the first three. All that, and he wrote a book: ES6 for Humans.
The three-man team that calls itself NA (no, definitely not N/A!) is building a Mongo DB Connector using Zenko. Each of the three team members, Guoxin Li, Artem Valmykov and Vitaly Tenigin have been students at 42 for more than a year. Guoxin and Vitaly live in the school’s dormitory; Art commutes, but occasionally crashes in the dorms. All three of them love a challenge. They’re learning a new language—Node.js—as they build with it but they say it’s fun – and they love the competitive spirit. They also say that the Scality engineers who came to help are awesome – super helpful and friendly (of course!).
Guoxin came to the U.S. from China ten years ago. He earned a Chemical Engineering degree from that little school up the road, U.C. Berkeley, and even passed the notoriously difficult EIT exam, but his passion is programming, so he left all of that behind for 42. He loves starting with nothing and building things from scratch. This is his third hackathon – he loves them because of the fast-paced creativity.
Art surprised me by telling me (in Russian-accented English) that he speaks Chinese. Originally from Russia, he earned a degree in psychology from Transbaikal University, and lived in China for ten years. He came to the U.S. a little more than a year ago and discovered 42 shortly after he arrived. He joined the school in June, 2016, as one of 42’s first students on the Fremont Campus. He lives in San Jose with his wife.
Vitaly has visited most parts of the Continental U.S. in the course of carrying out his job when he was a long-haul truck driver. He studied programming in Russia, but hadn’t yet finished his degree when moved to the U.S. nine years ago. He loves hackathons for the opportunity to learn something new – and that he is.
The three “C’s” of a great week are at play: collaboration, competition and, of course, coding.
The site of the Zenko hackathon is the campus of 42, an innovative—and free—computer programming university, in Fremont, California, and the sound of clicking keys is constant!
Participants are working to come up with creative modules, solutions and code using open source multi-cloud controller Zenko.
Watch this space over the next few days for descriptions of the teams and projects as they progress. Innovations could include blockchain integration, AI, IoT, cloud integration, or just hard core data storage technologies (dedupe, compression, encryption, …).
Eleven teams are hard at work, and will be judged at the end of the competition by a panel of four judges, on four criteria:
Execution
Performance
Design quality
Creativity (Finding a creative solution/use-case, implementation thought process, logic & algorithms, etc.)
Watch this space for team introductions and updates.
For us, among the highlights of AWS re:Invent 2016 were hundreds of enthusiastic people we met in the developer community. This event and the presentations brought thought leaders and IT professionals together to share information in an open forum.
As you read this, thousands of developers all over the world, inside enterprises big and small, are digging into our Amazon S3 API all the way down to the source code. We can’t wait to see what they create! It’s only a matter of time, and we’re nudging things forward. Find out for yourself what everyone’s raving about: get hands-on with S3 Server now.
Why the world is coming to open source
From the smallest of seedlings, open source has grown into THE innovation engine for IT. It’s no mystery why: lower development and operational costs, faster time to market, freedom from proprietary vendor lock-ins, high-quality solutions… and thanks to source code accessibility, the freedom to customize and fix at will.
The Ascendance of Open Source
GitHub
Founded in 2008
Reached 100,000 users about a year after launch
3 million users by January 2013
Adds an average of 10,000 users every weekday
Now hosts 27 million projects
Docker
Initial release March 2013
3 million downloads by June 2014
21 million total downloads by October of the same year
According to the annual 2016 “Future of Open Source” study by North Bridge and Black Duck, “Open source improves efficiency, interoperability, and innovation.” More than 65% of companies now use it for application development, and over 55% for production infrastructure.
We chose to make S3 Server open source for all these reasons, plus one more: open source has also become the fast path for sprouting and spreading hot new technology. Think Docker, Hadoop and their ecosystems, as well as NoSQL and NewSQL databases, just to take a few examples.
Not unexpectedly, open source is converging with another transformational IT phenomenon: the cloud. To paraphrase InfoWorld, if software is eating the world, the cloud is eating open source applications. Many winners of their 2015 Best of Open Source Software Awards (the “Bossies”) have a SaaS or hosted option.
The convergence is real: open source has definitely been folded into the great cloud migration. Still, there’s more than one way to get there. The public cloud, as pervasive as it may be, is not the best choice for every organization, every use case, every time. There are other paths to the same cost savings, dynamic scalability, and management ease. Which leads directly to the question:
Should we deploy on a public cloud or a private one?
Our emphatic answer is: Yes! That is, choose whichever model is best for your needs and each use case. Either way, your S3 Server-built applications have you covered. They will run impeccably on either kind of cloud, without your having to change a single line of code. How’s that for flexibility?
Dev and test with S3 Server. Then deploy on AWS, or alternatively, in your own data center using the Scality RING with industry-standard x86 hardware you’ve already invested in. Or go with a single-tenant private cloud hosted by a provider.
Any which way, you’ll gain immense scalability, vast TCO savings over traditional storage, and another advantage that’s truly unique: full application portability without having to rewrite code.
Born free
Open source is not an afterthought for S3 Server. It’s part of the very fabric. Open source is dear to our hearts because it’s the locus of originality, excitement, and innovation in IT today. We love the magic that happens when talented developers put their energy, ideas, and visions together to build something new. In fact, S3 Server was created from the work product of a gathering of hackers. Some of whom impressed us so much that we hired them.
Not a bad outcome for our very first hackathon! So we’ve just done it again:
Innovation on Display at Holberton Hackathon in San Francisco
On October 21-23, Scality brought together 6 teams of ambitious and talented developers to collaboratively build some great tools with Scality S3 Server and an array of Kinetic drives from our partner Seagate.
Participants included 2 UC Santa Cruz grad students, an exchange student from Australia, a UC Berkeley junior who’s won 5 hackathons so far this year, several first-time hackers from the Holberton School… and a coder nicknamed “Nacho” from the original Kinetic development team at Seagate.
First prize went to the intrepid “Team 42,” a youthful posse of French developers newly relocated to Silicon Valley to open the first U.S. office of Paris-based 42. They took top honors for their ingenious S3 Server-based collaboration tool.
Learn more about the Hackathon teams and their projects here.
