Update: On August 9, 2022, the Redis team increased the total prize pool significantly with the following breakdown:

• Four FIVE Grand Prize Winners to receive $2,000 USD
• Ten TWENTY Runners-Up to receive $200 USD
• TWENTY FIVE participants who included the optional video in their submission to receive $200

Hello, dear DEV community!

We wanted to stop by and let you in on some exciting news: today, we’re launching a new way for you to build an interesting application in the open, learn something new, and win exciting prizes in the process…

Announcing the Redis Hackathon on DEV 🎉

If you’re familiar with our hackathons here on DEV, you know that the community has a lot of fun with them and gets pretty creative with what they build. Whether you’ve joined us in the past or not, we hope you’ll throw your hat into the ring by participating in the Redis Hackathon on DEV!

Keep reading to get all the details on how you can enter this contest, more about Redis, and the prizes they’re offering our community.

Why Participate? What's so interesting about Redis beyond caching?

Redis is the most loved open source database in the world! Over the last several years Redis has evolved from a caching database into a multi-model primary database. This means your cache is now your database, and your database is your cache!

Secondly, because it’s multi-model, you can use it for collecting billions of events (like Kafka), storing JSON documents (like MongoDB), querying and indexing your data (like Algolia or Elasticsearch), analyzing time series data (like InfluxDB), and recommending (like Neo4j) – you can do it all in a single system and do it fast.

Redis gives you unprecedented flexibility to build anything you want, or just simplify a complex backend that has multiple data systems(Kafka + MongoDB + Algolia + InfluxDB + Neo4j + AnalyticsDB) with just a single system (Redis).

Furthermore, if you are using a microservices architecture, you can use Redis to connect all those services and process requests and responses blazing fast in both parallel or in-order fashion.

For this hackathon, you’ll be building a new app that uses many of these capabilities or migrate an existing OSS demo app and show reduced complexity and improved performance.

P.S. Want to get a sense of the benefits of Redis before you get started? Take a look at this 6 minute video:

From now through August 29th, 2022, DEV has partnered up with Redis for a community hackathon that will give you the chance to build a new application using Redis or simplify a complex backend. Anyone who submits a valid project (including an official submission post, published on DEV) will be automatically entered to win a variety of fantastic prizes (including up to $2,000 USD).

Project Categories

The Redis Hackathon on DEV is calling for projects in the following four categories:

• Minimalism Magicians: Simplify an existing OSS reference demo app from one of the cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP etc) that uses multiple data systems (such as ElastiCache, TimeStream, DynamoDB, Neptune, Kafka, etc) by replacing as many of the data systems as possible with Redis.

Notes for the “Minimalism Magicians” category:
• AWS examples: Samples repo, IoT Reference Architectures, Retail Demo Store
• Google Cloud examples: Samples repo , GCP Microserves demo
• Azure examples: Samples repo, Streaming at scale, Search with JavaScript. No need to create a new app, just port the backend of an existing app
• Be sure to show a before and after architecture diagram with a working demo application.
• Be sure to show the performance improvement between the new architecture and the old architecture.

• Microservice Mavens: Build an event-driven microservices application that primarily uses Redis features such as streams, pubsub, queues, JSON, search, time-series, etc. to provide a blazing fast yet simple platform. (Inspiration: GCP Microserves demo

Notes for the “Microservice Mavens” category:
• Video explaining how to use Redis with Microservices
• Recently published e-book: Understanding Streams in Redis and Kafka – A Visual Guide

• MEAN/MERN Mavericks: Build a new (or port an existing OSS) MEAN/MERN stack app and use Redis in one of the following three ways.

• Use Redis to your MEAN/MERN stack to add caching and advanced searching capabilities using JSON and Search modules.
• Use Redis as a primary database instead of MongoDB (i.e. replace “M” in MEAN/MERN with “R” for Redis).
• Use Redis along side MongoDB as a frontend database (“Write-behind” or “Write-Through”) in front of MongoDB (i.e. do all the CRUD operations directly with Redis and asynchronously send the updates back to Mongo for storage).

Notes:
Use Redis' Search and JSON modules for CRUD operations. Use Redis Gears to use Redis as a frontend database and asynchronously send updates to MongoDB ( Mongo Example ). Learn more about different ways (Cache-aside, Write-behind or Write-Through) of using Redis and Mongo here. Lastly, show the architecture diagram with and without Redis and performance improvements in your submission.
(Inspiration: Redis Launchpad.

• Wacky Wildcards: Build a random app that doesn’t fit into one of the categories above. With this category, we are looking for some truly silly and/or fun submissions. Feel free to dream big and ridiculously — and utilize any offering that Redis offers.

Tip: If you are still struggling to come up with something, please follow the Redis Org on DEV and look out for upcoming project ideas and additional resources that their team will be sharing!

💰 Prizes 💰

Four FIVE Grand Prize Winners (TWO winners in a random category and one per category for the other three:

• $2,000 USD gift card or equivalent
• $300 USD credit to the Forem Shop
• DEV Sticker Pack
• DEV “Redis Hackathon” Grand Prize profile badge

Runner-Up Prizes (10 20 Total – updated on August 9th):

• $200 USD gift card or equivalent
• $150 USD credit to the Forem Shop
• DEV Sticker Pack
• DEV “Redis Hackathon” Runner-Up profile badge

Participants (with a valid project):

• DEV Sticker Pack
• DEV “Redis Hackathon” participant profile badge

Bonus #1: We will be awarding $200 USD extra for all Grand Prize winners as well as Runners-Up that have a 5 minutes video as part of the submission (max 14 winners 25 winners – updated on August 9th.).

Bonus #2: Redis will promote the winners and top submitters’ apps over social media, and invite them to write guest blogs on the Redis official website to promote you and your accomplishments. The apps will also be featured on the Redis Launchpad

How to Participate in the Redis Hackathon on DEV

1) Sign up for a free Redis Cloud account by clicking here. Be sure to use the Redis Stack database in the cloud.

• Create a free Redis database, or use the special code DEVTO500 to get a $500 credit on a paid account with a larger storage (-- you’ll want to go this route if your project features a large dataset). Please note that you’ll need to choose a paid plan to use this coupon
• If you prefer not to use the cloud, you can install the Redis Stack Docker image instead.

2) Create a new and original app during the contest period for mobile, desktop, web, or CLI using Redis that falls under one of the categories listed above. Use one of the following languages:

• C#/ASP.NET Core
• Java/Spring
• JS/TS/Node.js
• Python
• Any other language of your choice (Note: Redis OM library only supports the above 4 languages but feel free to use any other libraries)

3) Use one of the following permissive licenses for your code: MIT, Apache, BSD-2, BSD-3, or Commons Clause.

4) Share your code publicly on GitHub and ensure that your repository:

• Includes a README using this template.
• Includes at least one screenshot of the app and/or architecture diagram.
• Clearly shows the commands used to store and retrieve the data for each feature (Example 1, Example 2.
• Describes how you store the data
• Describes how you read the data
• Includes a marketplace.json file with the metadata of the app (like app name, language, etc). See the marketplace.json files details here.

5) IMPORTANT: Use this post template to officially submit your application for the hackathon. Be sure to address every prompt and instruction in the template.

6) Be sure to publish your submission on DEV between August 1st and August 29th, 2022 (@ 11:59 PM UTC), and provide your app’s URL, screenshot, description, and source code

⚠️ Heads-up that you'll only be able to view our submission template linked above if you're logged into DEV.

Bonus Points! (additional $200 prize per winner)

As an optional supplement to your project, we invite you to create a video version of your submission post!

Our judges will be awarding “bonus points”* to anyone who creates a 5-10 minute publicly viewable YouTube video explaining their project, which can be embedded into your submission post on DEV (instructions in the template). These projects must have also won a Grand Prize or Runner-Up award to receive this bonus cash.

In this video you must…

• Talk about your app/project
• Tell us how your project stores and reads the data and what the data modeling is like
• Explain the architecture of your app
• Show some of your data using RedisInsight,
• And add a link to https://redis.info/try-free-dev-to in the video description in the first line of the description

• “Bonus points” in project consideration means that our judges will consider otherwise valid projects with the optional video add-on FIRST when selecting winners.

Additional Resources

The Redis team has put together some resources to help you quickly get started. If you still have questions, feel free to ask them in the help thread or Redis Discord.

1. Sign up for a free Redis Cloud account using this link and use the Redis Stack database in the cloud. For **datasets > 1GB **please use Redis Stack on Docker
2. Libraries: JavaScript: Redis OM Node (video, guide); Python: Redis OM Python( video, guide); Java: Redis OM Spring (video, guide), C#: Redis OM .NET (video, guide);
3. Redis Developer Hub for docs, samples and tutorials
4. Redis Stack getting started page
5. RedisInsight - Desktop GUI tool for inspecting the data

Additional Notes and Rules:

• We encourage you to share update posts on DEV using the #redishackathon tag to keep us posted on your progress (hint: use series: [“series name”] in the markdown heading of all your Redis Hackathon-related posts to link all content in a series)
• Multiple submissions are allowed
• If you collaborate with anyone, please list their DEV handles in your submission post so we can award a profile badge to your entire team! DEV does not handle prize-splitting, so in the event your project is named a Grand Prize-winner or runner-up, you will need to split those amongst yourselves. Thank you for understanding!

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Open only to 18+. Contest entry period ends August 29th, 2022, 11:59 PM UTC. Contest is void where prohibited or restricted by law or regulation. All entries must be new projects and created during the hackathon period. For Official Rules, see Contest Announcement Page and General Contest Official Rules.

Community Support

To ask any questions about Redis or about the rules of this contest, leave a comment in the Redis Hackathon help thread. Our team will be monitoring this space to answer your questions in collaboration with the Redis team.

Need some external motivation and guidance? Who doesn’t! We encourage all participants to swing by our community discussion thread where you can share your ideas and get suggestions on improvements from the DEV community as you build your app. You can also use this thread to share your progress along the way to get support from others.

Important Dates 🗓

• August 1, 2022: Hackathon Begins
• August 29, 2022: Hackathon Submission Due at 11:59 PM UTC
• August 30, 2022: Submission judging begins

Winners will be selected and announced in the weeks following the final submission deadline.

We’re so excited for you to join us for this brand new hackathon with our friends at Redis. Have fun, learn lots, and keep us posted along the way.

Good luck and happy coding! 🍀