At WP Engine, hackathons are three-day occasions that encourage all workers to collaborate on tasks that may probably enhance WP Engine’s internet hosting platform, our instruments, and the consumer websites that depend on them. The theme of 2025’s Hackathon was a nod to reliability and excessive vogue: “To the Nines.”
“Nines” are a unit of measurement used to explain the reliability of a system or course of. For instance, “5 9s” refers to 99.999% uptime (roughly 5.26 minutes of downtime per yr). “Dressed to the nines” means to be wearing one’s best or most elegant apparel, typically for a special day. To remain on theme, collaborating hackers diligently labored to enhance uptime and reliability by means of elegant venture concepts and wonderful coding.
Over 50 WP Engine workers participated on this yr’s hackathon, the place groups not solely improved reliability and efficiency but in addition competed for six awards:
- The 5 Nines
- Stitching the Future
- A Single 9
- Jeremy Stamp of AI-pproval
- Inexperienced with Envy
- Inclusive Innovation
Let’s study extra about our awards and our winners!
The 5 Nines award
Determined by in style vote, the 5 Nines award was given to a venture with an actual wow issue! This award went to Workforce WPE Sage (W.E.S.) for delivering a venture that embodied the “To the Nines” theme: an progressive sport changer for our clients throughout assist interactions.
Workforce W.E.S. had nearly 20 members from a number of capabilities inside WP Engine, together with Product and Engineering (P&E), Advertising and marketing, and Advisory Companies. Via cross-functional collaboration, these members developed a scalable, AI-powered voice agent that delivers dependable solutions on gross sales and support-related questions.
In underneath three days, Workforce W.E.S. delivered a venture that has the flexibility to enhance ticket decision occasions, response occasions, and buyer satisfaction scores.
Stitching the Future award
The Stitching the Future award (a.ok.a our “Government award”) was given to the staff whose venture caught the attention of WP Engine’s Chief Know-how Officer, Ramadass Prabhakar.
Workforce GreenSwitch gained this award for his or her work on Evolve WPods, the place they targeted on bettering WP Engine’s core webstack pod deployment course of to allow fashionable, zero-downtime deployments.
This staff transformed WP Engine’s present K8S deployment course of right into a quicker, safer blue-green deployment course of. What does this imply? Pods run the software program that serves buyer web sites. Presently, when WP Engine deploys an replace to our clients, there may be about one minute of downtime.
To mitigate this, Workforce GreenSwitch constructed a blue-green deployment system that step by step releases site visitors and might run even when there is a matter. A blue-green deployment system has two pods working on the similar time, permitting site visitors from one pod to be simply transferred to the opposite if there is a matter. One of these deployment permits for the brand new pod besides up within the background whereas the present pod serves site visitors.
As soon as the brand new pod is prepared, site visitors will be shifted over with none downtime. This new course of has the potential to cut back the chance of dangerous deployments and enhance our clients’ experiences by minimizing downtime.
The Single 9 award
The “Single 9” award was given to a staff that had a really elegant thought that would not be accomplished by the tip of Hackathon.
Workforce “The Traditional Suspects” used Monte Carlo (a platform that gives visibility into the well being and high quality of knowledge) and a customized evaluation perform to mechanically diagnose web site efficiency points. This technique would allow WP Engine to unravel efficiency points quicker, lowering downtime for our clients and their websites.
This venture was accomplished post-Hackathon and is now used to standardize and automate the detection of frequent issues, a.ok.a “the standard suspects,” in any system efficiency points.
Jeremy Stamp of AI-pproval award
VP of Product Jeremy Pollock picked the winner for this award, deciding on a venture that checks his “AI-pproval” containers. In different phrases, it’s the venture with one of the best use of AI.
This yr, Workforce “Web page Towards the Machine” gained for an progressive tackle efficiency insights.
Their venture developed a technique for customers to run an in depth evaluation on a selected URL from their web site to find out alternatives for efficiency enhancements or corrections. With the addition of AI, this device offers customers with actionable insights and data to boost their web site expertise. This venture is at present in manufacturing and can quickly be shipped out to our clients!
A concentrate on tradition: Our ERG awards
Two of our awards had been judged by WP Engine’s Worker Useful resource Teams (ERGs), that are employee-led communities that foster a various and inclusive office.
Inexperienced with Envy award
The “Inexperienced with Envy” award was judged by our Refresh ERG, an worker useful resource group targeted on sustainability, and was given to probably the most environmentally pleasant venture.
Workforce Route 99 gained for his or her venture “All Roads Result in Rome,” which serves as a proof of idea for changing WPE’s present server-side routing with a client-side routing answer.
This proof of idea reduces an software’s total server load and knowledge switch necessities, bettering efficiency and lowering vitality consumption. Their venture permits quicker web page transitions and a greater person expertise for the “My Websites” and “Atmosphere Overview” pages within the Person Portal.
Inclusive Innovation award
The Inclusive Innovation award was judged by WP Engine’s Embrace ERG. This ERG focuses on advocacy and assist of seen, invisible, and power disabilities and diseases at WP Engine.
Workforce WPE Compass created an app that allows WP Engine workers to easily search for a site and discover the entire account info in a single place. Previous to this venture, workers who wanted to entry account particulars needed to search throughout a number of databases for probably related info.
Workforce WPE Compass’ app delivers an answer that makes use of a site as enter and immediately receives related account info. This progressive answer delivers higher accessibility for all WP Engine workers.
Hackathon prizes
For every hackathon, WP Engine makes a donation to the philanthropy of every successful staff’s selection. This yr, WP Engine donated to the next charities on the behest of our winners:
Celebrating each hackathon venture
Though solely six groups gained awards, all collaborating groups used creativity and innovation to make an impression. Here’s a fast rundown of the remainder of the groups and their tasks:
- Workforce AI Tailor: This staff used AI to investigate logs and enhance the efficiency and reliability of headless functions.
- Workforce WPE Sensible Onboarding: This staff created an AI-powered onboarding expertise that helps new clients migrate their first web site to WP Engine.
- Workforce Weaver: This staff delivered a low-code app builder that helps builders create AI-powered net experiences utilizing WP Engine content material, platform APIs, and LLMs.
- Workforce Perco-Later: Mission Perco-Later changed present Percona databases with Google Cloud SQL for improved availability and simple upkeep.
- Workforce Focus: This staff created a “focus” mode that helps clients accomplish every day duties in Portal.
- Workforce 5: Created an answer that improves the “add websites” performance in Portal.
- Workforce Valencia: Mission Valencia targeted on constructing a design system for WP Engine’s plugin ecosystem.
- Workforce CrossSwords: This staff used AI to create WP Engine-themed crossword puzzles to extend worker engagement with our tradition and values.
- Workforce WP Engine Plugin Improvement Toolkit: Streamlined plugin growth by means of the creation of a toolkit that enforces coding requirements and finest practices.
- Workforce Again Dat SiteUp: This staff improved reliability and supplied proactive insights by introducing observable backup metrics.
Growing Reliability and Scalability
Though WP Engine hackathons sometimes final three days, every collaborating staff produced significant, inventive work that improves reliability and scalability. These occasions present alternatives for workers from all departments to supply their views and develop new proofs of idea that we use to enhance WP Engine’s internet hosting platform and instruments.
When you’re on the lookout for a task that gives alternatives to creatively deal with new challenges, take a look at our open roles!
