As part of PagerDuty Summit this week, our Community team will be hosting a chaos engineering inspired Breakathon at our office in San Francisco. During the four-hour event, participants will break out into teams of 3-5 people to compete in a race against the clock to resolve infrastructure failures.

You may be wondering why we’re only hosting the event for four hours, and not twenty-four, like most events that end in “thon.” PagerDuty’s philosophy centers around having humane and healthy on-call schedules. 24-hour shifts and superhuman feats of engineering heroics, while exciting, do not make for a healthy lifestyle. So in the spirit of good sleep hygiene, we’re limiting the event to four hours and following it with a relaxing happy hour with PagerDuty engineers.

The details

Competing teams will be given several sets of infrastructure, broken in one or more ways, which they will need to fix in some way. There may be more than one way to solve some of these challenges, so creative thinking is encouraged! We were inspired by elements from Stripe’s CTF, Tammy Butow’s Chaos Engineering Bootcamp, and conversations with our friends at Gremlin, Inc, so be prepared for a wide array of challenges.

Anyone with a device that can load web pages and SSH into things can join this event. You can bring your own team of friends and colleagues, or you can team up with others at the event.

The prizes

Members of the winning team will be taking home new iPads and runners-up will get $100 Amazon gift certificates. For everyone, there will be door prizes, as well as a raffle for two complimentary passes to the Web Summit in Lisbon. Winners will also be announced the following day on the PagerDuty Summit main stage.

The rules

• To win the first prize: The team has to solve all the challenges first or solve the most challenges of all teams. If there is a tie, the team that completed their challenges in the least amount of time will win.
• Teams: Each team must have at least three and no more than five members. Coming alone? Don’t worry, we’ll help you find a team to join!
• Participation: We’re limiting the Breakathon participation to the first 50 attendees. If you’re attendee number 50+, you can still stick around and watch the fun — and of course are more than welcome to join the happy hour!

The agenda

Here’s what you can expect:

• 3:00 PM | Doors open
• 3:30 PM | Wave 1 introduction & Breakathon kick off
• 4:00 PM | Wave 2 introduction & Breakathon kick off (for those coming from PagerDuty University)
• 5:00 PM | Food and drinks are served
• 6:00 PM | Happy hour officially begins. PagerDuty engineers join the Breakathon
• 7:00 PM | Pencils down. Final judging takes place. Winners announced. Raffle winners.
• 7:15 PM | Happy hour & networking continues!

Registration is free, and the seats are filling fast, so register today!

REGISTER NOW