How Grafana Hackathons Turn Weird Ideas into Real Features (Birds, Agents & More) | Big Tent S3E4

What makes a hackathon entry stand out — and how do those entries become features? Mat Ryer and Matt Toback host a panel with Grafana engineers Sven Großmann, Alexa Vargas Ortega, and Lukasz Gut to discuss how Grafana hackathons actually work — from science-fair projects and agentic monitoring to dashboard linting, birds, chess, and conspiracy theories.

You’ll hear how hackathon teams form, how ideas evolve (or pivot entirely), why storytelling matters as much as code, and how multiple Grafana features started life as a one-week experiment. Along the way, we cover AI tooling, pitching, working with people you’ve never met before, and why curiosity-driven projects matter.

If you’ve ever wondered how innovation really happens inside Grafana — this is it.

Timestamps:
00:00 – Welcome to Grafana’s Big Tent
04:00 – Wingspan, board games, and bird dashboards
07:45 – Chess, observability metaphors, traces, logs, and metrics
12:00 – Do hackathon projects really start like this?
15:30 – How hackathon teams form at Grafana
24:45 – Hackathons outside Grafana: Startup Weekends & university hacks
29:30 – From idea to pitch: communicating what’s possible in a week
34:30 – Where the agentic monitoring idea came from
43:00 – When hackathon projects pivot (and why that’s healthy)
49:45 – Solving real customer problems through hackathons
53:30 – What happens after the hackathon ends
56:45 – Hackathon code vs production-ready features
59:30 – AI tools (Claude, Cursor) and hacking faster than ever
1:02:00 – Birds, curiosity-driven projects, and final thoughts
1:04:10 – Wrap-up and goodbye
Links/resources:
Learn more about Grafana's Big Tent: https://bigtent.fm/
Have a question? Ask Grot, your AI helper: https://grafana.com/grot/
Reach out in our community forums: https://gra.fan/communityyf

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