How we validated and tested Hasura v3 with an internal hackathon

With our v3 release around the corner, we ran an internal two-day hackathon in an effort to validate and test our features, as well as to find potential bugs.

In this post, we share how this hackathon helped us prepare for a successful user-facing launch.

The new Hasura version 3 – which powers the new product offering called Data Delivery Network (DDN) – comes with significant architecture changes, as well as a ton of new features. So, it was important to stress-test this new system as well as find any remaining bugs and validate the user experience.

We also wanted to create awareness within the company and educate engineers on what DDN is all about. We wanted to ensure everyone is familiar with the new concepts, to help create buzz around them and help people visualize what this new product is all about.

At the same time, we wanted to create time and space for innovation, for thinking outside the box, and for discussions on how we can make DDN even more impactful. All of this in an effort to get ready for our public-facing launch.

The hackathon was two days long, and developers were free to work on whatever they wanted. Since the future of Hasura will be largely connector based (we offer the ability to build connectors to any data source you can imagine), we encouraged folks to look into the new connector specifiction and to even start building out connectors.

In the end, we had an independent jury vote on the submitted projects and we handed out prizes for gold, silver, and bronze.

As the clock ticked down, a total of seven projects and lots of feedback were shared. There’s no doubt that our teams care deeply about our users as we witnessed folks crafting solutions that exceeded expectations and inspired delight.

The three winning projects were not only recognized and celebrated but were also granted the opportunity to see their ideas brought to life!

We are happy this event helped drive awareness of Hasura DDN internally, and the v3 team got a lot of useful reactions, responses, questions, and feedback.

We had projects submitted around the following topics:

• Building connectors with TypeScript
• Building new connectors for Hasura
• Multi region capabilities
• Developer experience enhancements
• Caching enhancements

Here’s a highlight of two extraordinary projects in a bit more detail.

HasNeT stack

HasNet stack is an opinionated project starter kit that aims to help people ship from day one. It is an acronym for “Hasura + Next.js + Tailwind” and is inspired by the epic-stack. One of the biggest challenges in web development right now is that we have a lot of tools and frameworks to choose from and building the app gets sidelined in the process of choosing the right tools and frameworks.

The stack guarantees that the core choice of  “Hasura” + “Next.js” + “Tailwind” will remain in the stack forever. The stack will also come with some default swappable choices (for example, PostgreSQL for data storage, GitHub actions for CI/CD, etc.) ready to be used out of the box and switchable with other tools if one wishes.

TypeScript Connector

One project was a TypeScript-powered connector prototype using the Deno platform to host functions. The configuration for this connector takes the form of a TypeScript file, which implements the Hasura v3 specification functions exposed by the connector. The schema and documentation are inferred from the TypeScript source.

We showed a demo at Community Call – Launch Day event, and we’ll keep you posted on its development.

Overall, we can say that we were able to validate and test Hasura DDN, and identify a lot of small fixes and improvements from this hackathon. We also created awareness inside the company on the technical details of DDN, as well as the new concepts it comes with. We can recommend conducting a hackathon to validate and test a new version, and we hope it leads to as many incredible projects as ours 🎉.

Stay tuned for our v3 launch!