Simply Resilient Conversations
What does it take to build true cyber resilience?
In Simply Resilient Conversations Geoff Burke, Veeam Vanguard and Senior Technical Advisor at Object First, explores this question through engaging discussions with our ACES community members. Join us as we break down complex cybersecurity and data protection topics into accessible conversations that help IT professionals keep their production workloads running and their data safe!
Simply Resilient Conversations
The Veeam Community Hackathon
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Welcome And Why Community Matters
SPEAKER_00Hello, everybody, and welcome to Simply Resilient Conversations Podcast. The month is July, believe it or not. And I know people get annoyed when weather reporters on TV say, Wow, it's like July. Can you believe it? No, that's crazy. I mean, when you think about it, after July will be August and then will be September. So this is kind of expected. With all the unexpected things in the world, you'd think that the next month wouldn't be such a surprise, but it always is. But something that's not a surprise is good IT talent and fun community initiatives. And so that's why we're going to talk about a really great initiative today with the two people who founded it and run it. So let's introduce them first. I think you probably, if you're in the Veeam community, you know these faces and you've heard their words before. But there's never enough of good stuff, right? Right. So let's start again. Maurice Kavanaugh, Veeam Vanguard, and tell us some more about yourself.
SPEAKER_01You're forgetting the most important one, Jeff. The Optics First Ace.
SPEAKER_00Oh, of course.
SPEAKER_01Well, it goes about saying, but we're trying to be humble. We're trying to be humble. Uh Noel, yeah. My name is Marus Kavener. I live in the Netherlands. Um, I'm a Veeam Vanguard for six years. Uh Object Source Ace for the third year, I think. Um, and VUG leader in the Netherlands, and the automation desk over at the Veeam Community Hub as well. Um, and I'm here together with uh my uh partner in crime on the automation desk, Jonah May.
SPEAKER_02Yes, hi everyone. I I'll give my resume in a second. But really, you should already know my resume if you listen to this podcast, because we've already we did the AI episode a few months ago, Jeff. Exactly. But also the inventor also an object-first ace, also a user group leader for the automation desk, but also for Texas here in the old US of A. And yeah, located in the USA, obviously, if I'm the Texas user group leader. So don't forget the vanguards. Yeah. So both sides of the pond represented here today. Definitely. And that's always important. I guess you're Canada, so it would have been anyways.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And and the well, the thing is, is this is it's important to stress that all these communities and all of these um good fun events we're doing are always international. And that's another great benefit from them. You're not just meeting people across the street. I mean, maybe you don't want to meet your neighbors, they can be quite annoying at times. So it's great to have friends who are far away, right? Um, but anyways, okay, so let's people are going, okay, Jeff, stop what's happening? Like, what's the big event? So, guys,
October Hackathon Dates And Format
SPEAKER_00tell us what and when this event's gonna happen.
SPEAKER_01So we're doing another round of the Veeam Community Hackathon um this year. And again, um this year we are doing it in um October. Yeah. Um, yeah. Well, we're back to October, I guess. We are back to October. Maybe better, yeah. Well, five days again in October, starting October 12th, for five days long. We're doing the Veeam Kunity hackathon um once again for the fourth time already, Jeff. Wow, that's the fourth time, yeah. Remember you joined the first one.
SPEAKER_00I did, and and so the thing is is that like I I am really enjoyed the first time I joined, and then all sorts of other things have happened. No excuse, Jeff. So we'll see. We'll see. I'm gonna try to sign up for October. Now, one thing keep in mind, and this is another thing which we fully understand in IT communities, is that if your job has you traveling every week or something, it's hard for you to like parachute down into events, whatnot. But you know, this is one of the ones which, if I had a choice, if I'm not, you know, somewhere traveling in an airport, I would love to. So, but there's one question I have for you guys, and this comes up very often. A lot of the Veeam administrators, you
Non-Coders Have A Real Role
SPEAKER_00know, they know Veeam, they have a few little you know, scripting skills possibly, but a lot of them do not consider themselves coders. Maybe don't like coding, maybe are scared of coding, maybe don't want to look silly in a group of expert coders. But that is a misplaced fear, I think. So, what do you guys want to address that problem?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, you don't have to be the be a coder. Um, it's uh nowadays AI tools like Claude or Codex and whatnot can really help you um get you off the ground if you're if you're not familiar with coding. However, aside from coders of people who are actually building a tool, uh, we also need people to test the application that the team has come up with or make a presentation. And I know Jeff, some people are really, really, really good at that. Um, but we also need people to create visions and ideas and uh and support and find a business.
SPEAKER_02It's not just about innovation, it's are you creating something that serves a genuine need? Exactly.
SPEAKER_01It's it's just way more than just coding um for five days stray. It it's way more than that.
SPEAKER_00That's that's a really good point, and I think is probably the key aspect of this whole exercise. People forget that coding or creating programs, the actual work of coding is only one part. First of all, you have to identify a need. Second of all, someone has to address the need in the form of a plan. Then you get the coders. And let's face it, as you said, we have some coders in our desktops now, right? Chat GPT, Claude, even the Brave and Google searches now give you an AI mode. Then you need people who are good at testing to see if it actually works. Or maybe, because remember, we're dealing with human beings, maybe it works, but it doesn't look nice or it doesn't feel nice. There's the feeling aspect of it. And finally, you said somebody has to actually go out there and sing the song, play the music. Why is this great? And I think that's important.
SPEAKER_02So um, guys, we need the project manager in there and your design stage, right? And decided it needs to look pretty or it needs to be coded well, right? Like, you know, this is a little bit of programming speak, but who's gonna go out there and make mock-ups of the design? Who's gonna design the UML diagrams and determine how all the different files interact or how the database is gonna be organized if you're gonna build the date build the database?
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And so, and this is a contest, we realize that. So, what you're saying basically is the judges who judge and make the final decisions on what place each team gets are gonna take all of that into consideration. Exactly.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, there's actually when you sign up, there's a participant guide that has an entire scoring rubric, and it even covers things like did you write automated tests, did you write good comments and documentation in your code? Did you effectively work together as a team?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and and it's not just the five days that you um need to implement it. We have an ideation period right in front of the hackathon itself where you can in your own page, I think it's about a week that you get time for that, to discuss with your team who are you, what are your skills, what ideas do we have, what can we build, maybe even start drawing some mockups on on things that you your your idea is, um and and work together to get an idea of the things that you want to create during the implementation period. It's not just, oh, we only have five days building that thing that we want to. No, you have time for ideation. It's it's really pace. You don't need to rush um and and and run all day long for it. So that's important. Yeah, so it's important. Um you can do it on your own pace. It's it's it's not like you need to be working for 24 hours for five days strong. Uh for five days long. It's it that's that's crazy. You can do it next to your work or or um just take a day off or anything that you would like to do.
SPEAKER_02And
Scoring Rubric And Ideation Week
SPEAKER_02thank you for stalling because that gave me the time to now actually go and pull up our judging rubric real quick. So so so high level, you're you're you're scored based on impact. Do you provide a positive impact and address a major problem and create substantial value in your solution, your overall design, your innovation and business case? So not only do you do you address a problem, but have you done it in a creative or unique way that's different than something that already exists out there? Or does your solution show technical complexity? Or does it have good ease of use? So good UIUX, or you know, not just did you design it well, but did was it implemented well? Or do you have code coverage, which is, you know, linters, automatic tests, various different things? Did you show effective project management and teamwork? And then your presentation itself is actually 10% too. So did you provide a so you provide a five to ten minute presentation to judges and they can even score you based on the presentation, how you do in that presentation, the sort of content you cover, and how well you communicated your solution. So it goes all the way from design to implementation with programming to project management to even, you know, sales and marketing and market research across all the different categories. It's almost a microcosm of a it's almost a five-day microcosm of a startup.
SPEAKER_00And this is important to note, this makes it very different because people from the average, because people hear hackathon and they think of this. They think of some developer sitting there alone, hacking into a program and bringing out an exploit and you know, at like black cat conferences, whatnot. In a sense, you might even want to call you know the business-a-thon or something, because what you've just said is you are hitting on all aspects of program creation. Yeah, and and which is fun when you think about it. So,
How The Hackathon Started
SPEAKER_00so tell me one thing, Maurice, how many hackathons have you taken part in? And and how did this idea come about in the first place?
SPEAKER_01Well, the idea came um, I think, yeah, four years ago now. Um, with yeah, we I want to do a funny fan that runs all over the globe. It's not just something that runs in in in um well in a local VOG, for example. And I wanted to do it on the automation desk. So that was in February 2023. Um, I shared that with Jonah, the idea, and I shared it within Veeam as well. Um and we were like, okay, we it it really helps the community if we can bring them together and do some fun event with with a lot of people um and and and well create this uh these these awesome tools, and and the ones that are being created, I think uh some of them are still being developed or being used in in different solutions. For example, um if you if you're familiar with the Asbuilt report for Phoebe sif, the first year um one of the teams created best practices for phoeb365, and those are now built in in As Built Report as one of the reports, okay, you're not doing not doing these best practices compared to the best practice guides of Veeam.
SPEAKER_02Jorge De La Cruz one, if not several years, took his team's projects and kept iterating on them after the event for the community too. And they became some pretty useful tools if you're a you know, if you're the lone sysadmin or the small team sysadmin and you want your own kind of monitoring and reporting stack for your Veeam infrastructure and your overall status. Um yeah, and so Maurice came to me, like he said. I honestly have not done a hackathon in the traditional sense or had not participated or ran one before this, but you know, going through um school in my teenage years, I was a part of uh first tech challenge. So that is an international, first is an international group, and it was essentially a robotics competition. So not a hackathon per se, but you see a lot of overlap in kind of the things I did in that group with the design, the pitch to the judges, being part of the overall scoring, the innovation of your solution and taking it beyond just build the robot and program a robot into the different judging aspects because that was how a lot of the events ran. Like you would get promoted through some of the events up to you know nationals and the world championships by performing well in the competition, but they also had mind you, we haven't scaled it quite this far for our hackathon, right? But they had awards for community outreach and volunteering that you could advance through. If your presentation was good and your solution was overall innovative, you could still advance. There were at least three or five different conditions in which you could advance to the next round of competition. And they had nothing to do with how you performed on the field or very little.
SPEAKER_00So one thing I'm interested in too is let's say I'm gonna join the hackathon and I've got a team. Does it make sense, or have you ever thought about uh exposing needs in Veeam as a kind of guiding light to people? I'm just trying to think of what if someone's in the community and they're not an expert yet in Veeam, but they're learning it and they're not aware of certain pain points or things that people maybe want to get better in Veeam, or like little reports, like the AS report. I remember that very well because when I was a service provider, I wanted just one email of a all the jobs that finished. And you know, Veeam was sending me 15 emails and customers as well. So have you ever thought about actually, on top of giving people the freedom to choose whichever one way they want to go, also giving a list of or doing a survey? Folks, what would you like to see as a community project in Veeam?
SPEAKER_01Well, for starters, you're never uh alone in your team, you're always being paired with people who are experts in the field. Um at least that's what we try based on geographical locations. Um, so you're never alone in the team. And and there are several people in your team who already are familiar with the
Time Zones Teams And Discord Setup
SPEAKER_01the several Veeam products that we have out in the field. So they probably know from either their own uh experiences or from things that they found in the community what's lacking or what they are missing or what they want to see in in the products. So that as a team, you will find your way, and and and we have never had a year so far, knock on mood, that a team said, Yeah, I have no clue what to build. Um, we do have some ideas in our minds, um, ready for for if they are our people who say we have no clue, but that we try to give them the opportunity themselves because that makes it their own project instead of giving them a thing that they could create.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you don't want to make it too easy. That's like chat GPT. You want people to actually use their minds because that's where the originality comes up. So tell us more about the structure of the way this works. So, for instance, let's say I'm John Doe or you know, Jane Doe, and I'm I'm joining this. You've already uh persuaded me that I won't be alone. There'll be people there, possibly, you know, Veeam experts to help me along. Um, and so it won't be just a one-person show. But how does this actually work? Because my other concern would be, and I think you've kind of mentioned a bit, is how much time do I dedicate to this? And you said five days. And what if I'm working with someone in Southeast Asia? And so when I'm deep asleep, they're they're wide awake pinging me, hey, what's happening with our project?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's the first that we that's something we did the first year. Um, however, um we changed um that I think the second year in in the project. Um, yeah, we've tried to keep people somewhat geolocated by time zone.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So possible.
SPEAKER_01Yes, there is still a chance that someone pinks you at 1 a.m. saying, hey, can you do this or can you check this? But they are in the same time zone.
SPEAKER_02That just means they're an insomniac, not that it's you're saying it, not me.
SPEAKER_01Um some people just stay awake until 3 a.m. and then go to bed. It's it's it's up to uh you and your team, and that's something you can discuss as well. Okay, when when are you available? When can you um participate in the hackathon? When when can we count on you? When can we have a meeting with each other? Um, what's the best time for everyone to to have a call? Um and yeah, we have uh every team will get a Discord um set of channels specific for their team that they can chat in, they can have voice calls. So don't they don't require you to have a Teams license or or set up a Teams account and whatnot. No, that's all in Discord. You can just join a voice channel. Exactly. That's specifically for your team. Um and and and communicate with each other. There's no need for having a webcam on as well. Uh
AI Friendly API Wrappers On GitHub
SPEAKER_01it it all depends on on how and what you as a team decide on how you want to work with each other.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, and kind of circling back to one of your earlier questions, Jeff. Uh we talked about do we cede any ideas to people, which we obviously discussed, but I will say one thing we have done this year that's new is we've tried to kind of see if we can lower the barriers to entry, especially for people who use AI. So one of those is you know, we've been slowly taking different Veeam REST APIs documentation and converting it into Python packages that you can download and ingest where the AI can actually take that package and compare, instead of giving it a link and telling it to, you know, go fetch the API documentation and maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, maybe it hallucinates it. It in real time can basically build a Python virtual environment, install that wrapper API wrapper, and see what is available for function calls and inputs and outputs for those. And I mean, Maurice, I think you've used it for a couple projects at your company. I know I've used it to significantly revamp my company's customer portal, but we've even put out some open source kind of, hey, here's the here's the SDK. Now here's an actual implementation of it through actually building some home assistant, some basic home assistant integrations for some of the products like 365 and VBR. And that's just an example. Where can you get that?
SPEAKER_00Um GitHub, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's on GitHub. It's uh located in the organization called Senphora with a C. Um and uh there will be a link in the in the description where you can find it.
SPEAKER_02Um or we have posts on the Beam Automation Desk about it if you go to Yeah, there are posts on that one as well.
SPEAKER_01Um so yeah, um you can find them over there. And I think we have one for VBR, we have one for VB365, we have one for uh Service Provider Console.
SPEAKER_02And as of this week, we have one for Azure for a project I'm working on.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, we're still looking into Veeam One and Enterprise Manager as well to join the group.
SPEAKER_02Possibly cast in GCP AWS.
SPEAKER_00So what you're saying is that this hackathon is not just a contest, it's not just something take part and have fun. You actually have the ability to really learn or fast pace your learning of Veeam in general, the deep Veeam, how it works, what it does. So this is not just a Veeam, Jeff. It's not only Veeam.
SPEAKER_01Um if you, for example, um if you would implement something that would join Veeam backup a replication with Object First, that would be a great opportunity as well. It's not only Veeam, it it has to be linked to Veeam, but it it can contain other products if you want to do something.
SPEAKER_02Maybe you're building a VMw integration so VSPC can talk to your company's ticketing system. Maybe you're okay, this kind of already exists, so maybe not the best example, but maybe you're adding a revamping monitoring templates so that set your Zabbix stack or whatever monitoring stack you use can receive alerts from your VBR.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. So what you're saying is someone might have expertise in some other form of technology, as you mentioned, seams or basically anything, and not have a lot of expertise in Veeam, but by joining the hackathon, they'll meet someone who does in their team, and then they can use their expertise, and the joint benefit is enormous. So I know uh, for instance, just to mention, because uh Maurice is very humble that he ran or still runs the Chocolati um uh prop packages for Veeam. Um so Chocolati is totally different. If you know it's uh how would you describe it as a packet manager for Windows?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, Chocolati is a package manager for Windows, not a software manager, as people think, but it's a package manager. And there's a difference, but that's a different story.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but it's but it's a good story in the sense that you're an expert in that and you Even before hackathon combined to the, and I know a lot of people use that that that Chocolate package. So that's a perfect example. So we're trying to say is just because it's Veeam, don't say, Oh, well, I don't know any Veeam, I'm not going to get involved. That kind of thing. There's there's potential for you to add to your expertise, but but help both sides of it.
SPEAKER_01So it's not only it's not only Veeam that you learn. You can start learning and and and and and work on your your database knowledge or Python knowledge or any other uh PowerShell knowledge, for example.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean in theory, you could create a Veeam solution that doesn't even touch the Veeam products directly, right? Like this is kind of just spitballing here. But for example, one of the projects I've been working on with my company is, of course, what's the big question right now is how is your product using AI, right? So I've essentially managed to create a database on top of Postgres using something called PG Vector in the last few weeks that goes out and crawls our knowledge bases, some of our partners' knowledge bases and forums, including Veeams, and it assembles it and sorts it all by keyword. And so you have a chat bot, the data is anonymized, and yeah, it's ChatGPT under the hood, but it's using actually 4.0 mini from like two years ago, but still providing up to today's knowledge because every night those crawlers go out and pull new articles and new forum posts and whatever. And so if you ask it a question about something that was asked recently or is new for a new Veeam release, like 13.1 when it comes out, it has that documentation to help provide you answers and troubleshooting and different things at a very cheap cost, too, right? Like we we did about a hundred test queries in our dev environment and it cost only about four cents, for example. Wow. As opposed to the same thing.
SPEAKER_00So you're basically creating a vector database of this knowledge every day. Exactly.
SPEAKER_02100% it's a vector database on top of Postgres to do what's to do what's called the rag chat bot, uh resource assisted generation. So instead of relying on the latest
Using AI Without Blind Trust
SPEAKER_02frontier model that's trained on the latest information, you're feeding it new information as relevant sources.
SPEAKER_00So this is another aspect of the hackathon, which people might not have thought of, is that everyone who at least you know is worried about the future, well I think is everyone, uh worried about I gotta learn AI, I gotta learn AI. What you're saying is that this hackathon, whether we like it or not, is gonna be deeply integrated with AI. And so, right doing by doing that, you're gonna be learning that as well. So just from the point of view of let's use a chat box, let's use codecs. Well, maybe I've never used it before. Someone on my team might have. And sure, they'll do the majority of the coding, but hey, you're you've met them, you're talking to me, say, how do you use that? How do you set it up? That's always a lot faster than trying to Google some somebody you don't know and maybe made mistakes, right? Right.
SPEAKER_01And and but keep in mind that if you're using AI um in any of your products, you still need to understand what it created and understand what it does. Do not blindly trust on what what it created. You need to be able to tell your story to the judges as well, um, and not blindly trust trust on what the AI is.
SPEAKER_02I explained why it did what it did. Like when someone asks me why hypothetically, whatever page now is set with a lazy load command. Well, that's because that before the old dev team pre-AI on this portal in this particular example had that page or that form or that pop-up load on every single page load, and it was slowing down page loads by like 0.3 seconds. Okay, well, I've done that now in 10 places. Those are only needed in specific cases, so now it's only loaded when it's needed. And now, you know, my pages load in one second instead of five seconds.
SPEAKER_00Right, right. And that that's really important. So, yeah, I think that's another key element, which is good to get yourself used to or train yourself not to blindly trust. I mean, you don't want to find out your bank account was drained because you gave the agent too much. Yeah. But also because again, no one's gonna take away learning. Like I heard someone say the other day that, well, universities are gonna disappear. And I said to them, well, the problem is you've missed the point. The point's not the piece of paper. I think maybe most of us went to university, some of us went a long time ago. It was the basic training. It's kind of like marathons. I like to use this metaphor. You know, you think it's the big metal you get at the end, but what you forget is the real gold of that was to be able to get to that end. What systems did you create? What did you learn about yourself? What are those systems which can then be placed somewhere else? So that same discipline, that same training, that same scheduling, that same dealing with setbacks like injuries, you can use that template on something else, and your brain will automatically. And so this hacker.
SPEAKER_02It's secretly an exercise in copyright and trademarking, too, because I don't remember who it was for sure. Maybe it was the U.S. Patent Office, but someone here in the States put out an article last year that basically said you cannot trademark or copyright fully AI generated content. So AI generated art. It basically you have to prove it was your thought process and that you were continually guiding the AI and that you didn't just sit down and give it a two or three commands and let it generate something completely from scratch. And you were going to say how your guy, like you don't necessarily have to write code yourself, but your guidance has to be heavily involved in order to be granted those trademarks and copyrights now, if I remember correctly.
SPEAKER_00I mean, that's I I I agree with that totally. I think it's difficult to implement because what I could always do is get three LLMs and have them. Okay, you talk to that one, talk to that one. But you're right, it has to happen again.
SPEAKER_02And then you're able to explain what it's what the code is doing and why in the case of at least a programming project. And what alternatives were there?
SPEAKER_00What alternatives? Because we can't explain why you did it this way, not that way. I think it's important. But again, the underlying, I think, and this is about the hackathon or any learning is remember, we still are stuck with our biological brains, which are much cheaper, by the way. They run on the energy of a lamp, uh, like a lamp, right, in your house. That's what our brains run on. A little bit slower.
SPEAKER_02Technically, they run on the energy of the sun, if you think about it.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. So the end of the day, we want to make our brains better. And so as a crutch. So getting back to the hackathon, um, it's coming up in October.
How To Join And Final Pitch
SPEAKER_00Uh, give us some details about where, when, how to apply. Um, do you apply with a team or do you guys create the teams? That kind of information.
SPEAKER_01You can you can join with a team, or you can just depend on us um that we will create a team for you. Um, either option is possible. Um, so yeah, if you want to join, and if you're really interested after hearing this podcast, um go to vimahackathon.com and to for for more information and a sign-up link as well. Um that will guide you to our uh new signup portal as well that we created. Uh, you you create an account, you fill in a form, you join. Um, and after you join, there's even a possibility to generate an image with your photo and say, I'm joining the VinkUnity hackathon. And you can share that on your socials as well to uh get your free get your friends on board. Um you can even invite your friends if you want to.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it sounds like a good idea. Yeah, yeah. So, as a final uh message, what would you both like to say to people who are considering who maybe are wondering whether they have the time or whatnot? What's your final pitch for the hackathon?
SPEAKER_01My final pitch would be take a leap of faith. Just there's no uh failure in trying. Take that leap of faith, join the hackathon, see what you can do, and and see what uh possibilities, capabilities you have you didn't know. Great point.
SPEAKER_02Or and in my case, uh in the words of Nike or Shia LaBeouf, depending on your familiarity with internet culture, just do it. That's that's that's for certain. Don't let your dreams be dreams. Yesterday tomorrow.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. Well, folks, I would say this definitely join this. You've got nothing to lose, uh, you've got a lot to gain. And again, these guys have been doing it for a while. They're getting better and better at it, and it's a fun experience. And also, final thing I'll say is if you don't know the Veeam community and you wanted a way to get into the Veeam community, not just joining up and starting to post, this is a fast track. You join the hackathon, you're gonna meet up with some of the top community members and be on a name, you know, first name basis with them right away. Okay, folks, thank you very much. Uh, please remember it's October. We've if you've got any questions, please message us directly on the Veeam Community Hub. We're all there, myself, Maurice, and Jonah. And guys, I wish you a lot of luck this year. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. Maybe we'll see you this year if you're scheduled.
SPEAKER_00I I'm I'm gonna sign up right now. Good. Okay.