PLEASE NOTE: You need to register on the Eventbrite and attend in person to be able to participate.

What is it?

The Hopper Elasticsearch Hackathon is an all-day power hack during which hackers get access to a huge cluster (30 8-core instances with 32GB RAM and 250GB disk per node) and are set free to create something awesome using Elasticsearch.   In the first hour, we’ll provide an overview of Elasticsearch and an in-depth tutorial to get new and experienced users up to speed with the search engine's features and implementation.   During the day, we'll have highly skilled mentors available to answer questions, help troubleshoot, and advise and inspire you along the way. We'll also provide lunch and dinner, caffeine and soft drinks.


09:30a  – Welcome & Introduction to Elasticsearch

10:00a  – Pitch ideas and forming teams

10:15a  – Tutorial (optional)   

10:30a  – Coding starts!

12:00p  – Lunch

06:00p  – Dinner. Coding ends!

06:30p  – Team presentations & Voting

Why Elasticsearch?

Elasticsearch is a cloud-based, distributed, RESTful search server based on Apache Lucene.   Advantages of Elasticsearch include:

  • Real-time search
  • Multi-tenancy
  • Supports faceting and percolating
  • High availability
  • Full text search

If you aren’t familiar or need a refresher, provides a great overview and tips for getting started and additional information is available at

Why bother?

Because we'll have awesome sponsors providing compute (SoftLayer), mentors (Hopper, Traackr, Elasticsearch) and space (hack/reduce), all to give you a unique occasion to have access to computing power, powerful technologies, fellow hackers and experienced Elasticsearch users all in the same room!   Prizes include a 1-year subscription for SoftLayer (a $12,000 value) and a seat in an Elasticsearch training course (a $1,600 value). 

Where is it?

hack/reduce, the big data hacker space serving the Greater Boston tech community located at 275 Third Street at the corner of Binney Street in Kendall Square.

What should I bring?

  • Your laptop and charger
  • A water bottle: hack/reduce is trying to generate as little trash as possible; there will be many places to fill up throughout the day!
  • Project ideas: 
  • Data sets: 
    We'll be preloading some data sets, but if there's something specific you're interested in or you have access to data sets that you think could be of interest to other participants, bring your ideas and we'll help get them indexed and available for everyone on-the-day. 

Hackathon Sponsors


$13,600 in prizes

Popular Choice

The team with the best hack by popular vote wins a 1-year subscription for compute from SoftLayer.

Runner Up

The team with the second best hack by popular vote wins one seat in ElasticSearch training.
The seat will be awarded to a team member picked at random from the second best team.

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:





How to enter

Please sign up for this event via the Eventbrite link below provided you are able to physically participate at the hack/reduce facility on July 20th.  hack/reduce is located at 275 Third St., Cambridge, MA 02142.


Hackathon Participants

Hackathon Participants

Judging Criteria

  • Crowd-Voted

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