DEV Community

Cover image for Announcing the New Relic Hack the Planet Contest!
Jess Lee Subscriber for The DEV Team

Posted on

Announcing the New Relic Hack the Planet Contest!

Today, we're kicking off the latest DEV hackathon in partnership with New Relic: Hack the Planet šŸŽ‰

In today's world, climate change is much more than a vague threat ā€” it's an ever-present reality. As humans continue to impact the environment and a related financial and technological gap persists, vulnerable populations are being hit the hardest and fastest. The planet needs our help!

That's why we're partnering with New Relic for a new hackathon that's all about climate change and the game-changing innovations we're capable of as developers.

From now through February 28th, we're challenging you to build an application using New Relic's recently-released New Relic One platform across three climate change-related categories:

  • Science and Observation: Utilize New Relic to observe science phenomena (polar ice cap reduction, COVID-19 cases, CO2 emissions, etc.) around the world with the power of open source data.
  • New Year, New Resources: Implement New Relic into an existing application you've built and add a climate-centric feature.
  • Out of this World: - Build an awesome application using New Relic that doesn't fit into the other two categories above. With this category, we are looking for fun, innovative and truly "out there" submissions. NOTE: This category will include a required short essay prompt surrounding observability and climate change. This prompt will be located at the bottom of the submission template shared below.

What is New Relic?

In short, New Relic delivers a simple yet powerful platform to give the worldā€™s developers an instant view of the performance of their software.

New Relic One includes everything you need to support observability, with a unified user experience and dramatically simplified packaging - made for ALL developers.

Observability tools are a great way to supercharge your development workflow to identify issues and tackle them in a timely, organized manner. This is exactly the attitude we need when fighting the threat of climate change!

Learn more about New Relicā€™s unique observability offerings through their documentation here.

Why Participate?

New Relicā€™s Hack the Planet contest on DEV is a great way to experiment with New Relic's efficient observability software ā€” and step away with a shiny new app under your belt. More importantly, it is an opportunity to use your talent/skills to help our planet.

Oh, and there's a pretty sweet lineup of rewards if you need more convincing šŸ˜‰

Prizes

3 Grand Prize Winners (one in each category):

  • $5,000 USD gift card or equivalent
  • $350 USD credit to the DEV Shop
  • New Relic Swag Pack
  • DEV Sticker Pack
  • ā€œHack the Planetā€ grand prize profile badge on The Relicans community
  • Your choice of eco-friendly New Relic swag, OR a donation to the Environmental Defense Fund
  • A tree planted in your name

Runner-Up Prizes (10 Total):

  • $500 USD gift card or equivalent
  • $150 USD credit to the DEV Shop
  • New Relic Swag Pack
  • DEV Sticker Pack
  • ā€œHack the Planetā€ runner-up profile badge on The Relicans community
  • - Your choice of eco-friendly New Relic swag, OR a donation to the Environmental Defense Fund
  • A tree planted in your name

Participants (with a valid project):

  • DEV Sticker Pack
  • ā€œHack the Planetā€ participant profile badge on The Relicans community
  • Your choice of eco-friendly New Relic prize pack, OR a donation to the Environmental Defense Fund
  • A tree planted in your name

Introducing The Relicans Community from New Relic

This week, New Relic launched a new and dedicated community space (built on Forem ) called The Relicans, which will serve as a homebase for users and enthusiasts, as well as anyone interested in learning more about observability as it relates to software. The Relicans community is worth checking out and joining if you are a developer thatā€™s interested in gaining more insight into how your applications function, connecting with the New Relic team directly, and building efficient, production-grade apps.

Participants in this hackathon will be submitting their final projects and asking any hackathon-related questions through The Relicans community.

How to submit your app and enter Hack the Planet

Sign up for an account on The Relicans community (and say hi in the welcome thread!)

  • Create a New Relic account if you don't already have one
  • Create an app using New Relic that falls under one of the categories listed above
  • Use one of the following permissive licenses for your code: MIT, Apache, BSD-2, BSD-3, or Commons Clause.
  • Use this post template to officially submit your application for the hackathon on The Relicans community. Make sure you read specific instructions for your category!
  • Be sure to publish your submission on The Relicans community between January 28 and February 28 (11:59 PM PT)), and provide your appā€™s URL, screenshot, description, and source code.

Bonus points forā€¦

Showing your findings after implementing New Relic One in a screencast (we recommend Loom). If you want guidance on how this could look we have plenty of videos on learn.newrelic.com.

** ā€Bonus pointsā€ means we will give submissions with these criteria priority when selecting winners.

Additional Rules

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Open only to ages 18+. Contest entry period ends February 28, 2021, 11:59 PM PST/ 8 AM UTC on March 1, 2021. 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 New Relic throughout the hackathon, leave a comment in the New Relic Forem help thread

New Relic is also offering a community discussion thread where you can share your ideas and get suggestions on improvements from the DEV community as you build your app. We encourage you to share your progress along the way to generate more excitement and benefit from additional community feedback suggestions.

Important Dates šŸ—“

  • January 28, 2021: Hackathon Begins
  • February 28, 2021: Hackathon Submission Due at 11:59 PM PST
  • March 8, 2021: Hackathon Winners Announced

Weā€™ll be keeping our eyes eagerly on The Relicans community to see the amazing climate-protecting apps you build. Happy coding!

Top comments (51)

Collapse
 
dannydouglass profile image
Danny Douglass

This is awesome! Really impressive initiative from DEV and New Relic, especially the focus on climate change. šŸ‘

I'm Danny and I lead the growth engineering team at Courier where we help developers build and send user notifications from their app. Think: email, SMS, push, and chat apps like Slack and Discord.

If you're looking to build an app that notifies people in any way, we'd be more than happy to help! Courier is totally free to sign up and you can send up to 10,000 notifications per month, for free.

Hit us up here or in our Community if we can support any projects. šŸŒŽ šŸ’œ

Good luck everyone! #HackThePlanet

Collapse
 
graciegregory profile image
Gracie Gregory (she/her)

Can't believe this challenge is here already.

Super excited to see what everyone builds for an awesome cause. And congrats to The Relicans community āœØ šŸŒ±

Collapse
 
geobrodas profile image
Georgey

Hey Gracie!
I still didn't get the badge and Mail for
Dev x DigitalOcean hackathon.
It's just my humble request I just want to know what went wrong.
Please šŸ™šŸ¼šŸ™šŸ¼šŸ™šŸ¼

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Good luck everyone, save the planet!

Collapse
 
rolfstreefkerk profile image
Rolf Streefkerk

Just wait a decade or so when the next Milankovitch cycle starts to cool the planet.

If you're worried about saving it, start with reducing the plastic waste in the world's oceans. A problem we can actually solve.

Collapse
 
ashusharmacs profile image
Ashu Sharma

Can someone please tell me what is new relic? Im curious to know about it and how to use it?

Collapse
 
bytrangle profile image
Trang Le

All I understand is it is a service that helps you monitor your app. Its demographic is enterprises and it is more primarily known amongst devops, so it's unsurprising if you haven't heard about it.

As for the climate thing, I believe you have to use API from a different service. New Relic has nothing to do with climate per se. Anyone else feels free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Collapse
 
thejonanshow profile image
Jonan Scheffler

New Relic lets you see what's going on with your software, so you can see errors and logs and which parts are slow all in the same dashboard. It helps you find and fix errors and speed up the slow parts of your code.

You install a library in the app you want to start analyzing, so for Ruby you would do this:

bundle add newrelic_rpm
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

There are lots of other things you can install to monitor different parts of your application, like the servers where it runs and the front-end javascript so you can see when people get errors in their browser.

Once you sign in they'll give you instructions on how to get started. It can be intimidating at first because it can do so much, but I recommend you start with Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and go from there.

New Relic University is a good place to learn: learn.newrelic.com/
The developer website is also really helpful: developer.newrelic.com/

Collapse
 
thejonanshow profile image
Jonan Scheffler

If you're looking for help getting New Relic to report data or something closer to support you'll probably find an answer on discuss.newrelic.com/.

Collapse
 
brendamichellle profile image
Brenda Michelle

Check out this video it might help and new relic has a very good youtube channel with explanations, tutorials and examples 100% recommend it šŸ˜ŠšŸ‘youtu.be/7omo0qHxku8

Collapse
 
marmeden profile image
eneasmarin

+1. I am gonna have a look to the site later, but if some could give us a short intro, I would appreciate it

Collapse
 
_echo3d_ profile image
echo3D

LOVE this! We love hackathons and can't want to see what amazing projects participants will create with New Relic to combat climate change!šŸŒŽšŸŒ±

Hi all! We're the echoAR team. We provide a cloud platform for augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) that provides tools and network infrastructure to help developers quickly build and deploy 3D apps and content.

If you're looking to build an AR/VR app as part of the hackathon, we'd love to happy! echoAR is FREE and intuitive (but we have awesome docs to get you started).

You can reach out to us via our community channel and get inspired by amazing AR/VR projects featured on the inspiration page of our platform (many of the projects were created during hackathons!) .

Best of luck to everyone!āœØāœØāœØ

Collapse
 
tuliocalil profile image
Tulio Calil

Super excited for this!
let's hack!

brasil

Collapse
 
realtoughcandy profile image
RealToughCandy.io

Very exciting! You've got some great eco-friendly prizes, too.

Collapse
 
justjordant profile image
Jordan Taylor

"HACK THE PLANET!!"

Collapse
 
bengreenberg profile image
Ben Greenberg

An awesome first DEV x New Relic hackathon from an awesome Relicans team. Way to go!

Collapse
 
michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington

Woot! This is such an awesome initiative for a hackathon. šŸŒ±

Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.