Developer Newsletter: Astra Hackathon Results and Upcoming Workshops

This issue comes to you from the DataStax Developer Advocate team.

Last week we wrapped up our 8 week Cassandra Developer Workshop series with a special bonus episode to honor the winners of the Astrackathon - our hackathon for developing applications on Datastax Astra. David Jones-Gilardi (@sonicdmg) captured the sentiments of the team: “I was curious to see what we were going to get, and I had a ton of fun going through all the projects everyone submitted.” Here’s what we had to say about the winners:

• Our first place winner was Marat Gubaidullin for his Infinity project. Bettina Swinnerton said: “I was absolutely blown away by the quality, it has a lot of diagrams on how the app is composed, it has very clear instructions, every step worked, it was Dockerized... It’s a time series that’s aggregated into a forecasting application, with a great UI and nice layout.”
• Second place went to Kevin Gorczowski - As Aleks Volochnev (@hadesarchitect) shared, Kevin’s submission is “a great Java project regarding radioscopy research in the medical field, the code is very clean and easy to understand... very well Dockerized / containerized, and in general very good overall view, it looks nice.” 
• In third place we have Ayan Chakraborty for his Asset Management application. According to Cedrick Lunven (@clunven), this is “a Maven project, well structured, using the long term support JDK 11… there is a lot of documentation for us to deep dive, good package structure, a good data model using bucketing where needed, and some curl commands for testing... It’s really a good sample for anyone wanting to do a project on Astra or Cassandra.!”

If you missed out on the Astrackathon, don’t worry, this won’t be your only opportunity to show your Cassandra skills - we’re partnering with Hacker Earth and Major League Hacking to do more hackathons in the near future. As Patrick McFadin (@patrickmcfadin) shared, “When you do something like this - put it on LinkedIn because that’s where you get noticed. We will amplify it and make sure you are well known as a total rockstar.”

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Astrackathon and to those who completed the workshop series. In case you missed the awards ceremony and our Ask Me Anything session, you can check out the recap video on our DataStax Devs YouTube channel.

We were listening to all your feedback and are working hard to make future workshops even better. So what’s next? Read more below…

Upcoming Events 

• For our fall developer workshops, we are going back to basics and targeting developers who are either new to or haven’t used Cassandra. 
• This week’s Introduction to Cassandra (video replay) was a hands-on workshop on the basics of building applications with Apache Cassandra using DataStax Astra. If you missed it and are interested, don’t worry, we’ll be running this workshop again soon. 
• Upcoming workshops will also cover Spring Boot and Building Microservices for Apache Cassandra. Follow us on Eventbrite & subscribe on YouTube to get notified.

Example of the Week

• This week’s example is Demonstrate All Astra APIs - contributed by @qzg
• This example demonstrates how data in DataStax Astra DbaaS can be accessed using four different APIs (so far): GraphQL API, REST API, Cassandra Query Language (CQL) API and Mapper API
• Walk through this example with Kiyu Gabriel: YouTube Video
• Become a contributor! Try this example, add your own flair, and submit a PR. Or submit your own example through the DataStax Examples Submission Form or example@datastax.com

Community Highlights from Cassandra.Link

• Blog Series: Cassandra - What you may Learn the Hard Way - An older series but still very relevant to most new people who are learning Cassandra today. 
• dse-pronto - Intuit’s automation Datastax in AWS on Packer, Terraform, and Ansible and works with Jenkins, CodeBuild/CodeDeploy, Bamboo, Gitlab, Spinnaker.
• Polynote | The polyglot Scala notebook - Polynote has a rich language aware editor, D3/Vega based visualizations, supports Python, Scala, and Apache Spark (by Netflix OSS).
• Quix - New entrant into the data notebook world works with Presto, Athena, BigQuery, MySQL, PostgreSQL and any database that supports JDBC including Cassandra (by Wix Engineering).  

New Podcast Coming Soon

We’re shaking things up and introducing a new technical podcast, and saying goodbye to the Distributed Data Show. If you haven’t already, take a listen to this week’s series finale. Reminisce with Jeff Carpenter (@jscarp) and Sam Ramji (@sramji) as they discuss the original inspiration for the show, reminisce about great episodes, plus closing thoughts from Patrick McFadin and David Jones-Gilardi. Also, a big thanks to our audience and all who have contributed over the last three years. We’ll share more about the Open || Source || Data podcast as we launch on September 15.

Have a question or comment? We’d love your feedback: developer@datastax.com | @DataStaxDevs.