Phillip Ahereza and Allan Guwatudde win Mattermost Bot Hackfest with DigitalOcean Plugin

More than 2,000 developers from around the world participated in our open source bot hackfest, which we hosted on HackerEarth from January 10 through March 2. 

The goal of the event was to work with our community to create open source chatbots that integrate with Mattermost to accelerate DevOps and DevSecOps workflows, and we received many amazing submissions!

We gave away $10,000 in prizes, including $6,000 cash to our top contributors:

• First prize ($3,000) – Phillip Ahereza and Allan Guwatudde, who worked on a DigitalOcean plugin
• Second prize ($2,000) – Dhruman Bhadeshiya, Hemang Pravinbhai Kothari and Amitkumar H. Bhimani, who worked on a ChatOps bot between AWS, CodeShip, GitLab and Mattermost
• Third prize ($1,000) – Zubair Ahmed, who worked on a Netlify plugin

Congratulations to the three winners!

We also gave out Mattermost swag kits to everyone else who made a qualified submission. These kits include a branded hackathon t-shirt, a hat, programmable NFC stickers, a water bottle, socks, and other stickers.

Huge thanks to everyone who participated in this incredible event! 

Highlights from the event

Here’s a brief synopsis of seven chatbots—the three winners and four runners-up.

1st place: DigitalOcean chatbot plugin for Mattermost

This plugin supports a variety of features, such as:

• creating, renaming, and rebooting DigitalOcean droplets from Mattermost
• retrieving a list of all of the domains in your team
• adding, retrieving, and deleting SSH keys
• retrieving a list of all database clusters and their backups
• adding, listing, and deleting database users
• listing Kubernetes clusters and nodes
• retrieving cluster kubeconfig files
• …and much more!

See the full list of features and installation guide on the plugin homepage.

Amazing work Phillip Ahereza and Allan Guwatudde!

2nd place: Chatbot between AWS, CodeShip, GitLab and Mattermost

This chatbot integration created by Dhruman Bhadeshiya, Hemang Pravinbhai Kothari, and Amitkumar H. Bhimani integrates Mattermost with AWS, CodeShip, and GitLab to accelerate DevOps workflows.

Key features include:

• CodeShip build notifications: Bot notifies users when a build from CodeShip starts, succeeds, or fails.
• AWS instance configuration: Start, stop, or reboot AWS instances and scale EC2 instances on the fly. You can even add permission checks requiring manager approval for configuration change requests inside Mattermost!
• GitLab and CodeShip commit status: Users can check whether specific commits have deployed and fetch the build data via GitLab and CodeShip APIs.
• Powered by Google Dialogflow: The bot uses Google Dialogflow as its NLP engine, enabling users to converse with the bot without having to remember every command precisely.
• … and much more!

See the integration home page to learn more.

3rd place: Netlify chatbot plugin for Mattermost

The third-place winner of this hackathon is Zubair Ahmed, who built a Netlify plugin.

This plugin supports:

• retrieving information from a Netlify account, such as name, URL, domain, and repository
• deploying and rollback of new Netlify builds
• subscribing to build notifications from Netlify
• …and more!

Wonderful work Zubair!

Honorable mentions

In addition to the top three winners, we received dozens of other chatbot submissions. The turnout was amazing!

Here are a few notable submissions that didn’t make it to top three:

• Lighthouse Auditing Bot from Andre Vasconcelos, which adds performance auditing of websites with Google’s Lighthouse, offering a testing environment that is accessible directly from any Mattermost channel.

• Mattermost Issue Resolver Plugin from Abdul Sattar Mapara, Saket Chopade, and Pritam Kumar Sahoo, which helps answer questions right in Mattermost by retrieving answers from StackOverflow or recommending a user who possesses the skills required to solve the issue.

• UMatter Bot from Abhilash K R, which rewards peers right when and where great work is happening by giving instant appreciation in the form of points directly in Mattermost channels. This was one of the most unique ideas we saw during the hackathon!

• Mattermost Mammut.io bot integration, from Genesis Montenegro, Elieser Pereira, Marco Sandoval, and Juan Morón, which provides Kubernetes ChatOps operability—such as simulating a Kubernetes cluster—right from your Mattermost deployment.

Thanks again to everyone who participated for all the wonderful submissions—and making this the best hackathon we’ve had to date!

Interested in contributing to Mattermost?

Throughout the year, Mattermost hosts a number of events designed to get people like you involved in our open source project, like our 2019 virtual hackathon. 

If you’re interested in participating in our next event, please follow us on Twitter and stay on the lookout for an announcement.

But you don’t have to wait for a hackathon to get involved with Mattermost. In fact, getting started as a platform contributor is easy. You can also stop by our contributors’ community channel and browse our open help wanted tickets.

Thanks again to all who participated in this event. We hope to see you next time!