WP Engine’s Hackathon Takes Projects “To the Nines”

At WP Engine, hackathons are three-day events that encourage all employees to collaborate on projects that can potentially improve WP Engine’s hosting platform, our tools, and the client sites that rely on them. The theme of 2025’s Hackathon was a nod to reliability and high fashion: “To the Nines.” 

“Nines” are a unit of measurement used to describe the reliability of a system or process. For example, “five 9s” refers to 99.999% uptime (approximately 5.26 minutes of downtime per year). “Dressed to the nines” means to be dressed in one’s finest or most elegant attire, often for a special occasion. To stay on theme, participating hackers diligently worked to improve uptime and reliability through elegant project ideas and excellent coding.

Over 50 WP Engine employees participated in this year’s hackathon, where teams not only improved reliability and performance but also competed for six awards:

• The Five Nines
• Stitching the Future
• A Single Nine
• Jeremy Stamp of AI-pproval
• Green with Envy
• Inclusive Innovation

Let’s learn more about our awards and our winners! 

The Five Nines award

Decided by popular vote, the Five Nines award was given to a project with a real wow factor! This award went to Team WPE Sage (W.E.S.) for delivering a project that embodied the “To the Nines” theme: an innovative game changer for our customers during support interactions. 

Team W.E.S. had almost 20 members from several functions within WP Engine, including Product and Engineering (P&E), Marketing, and Advisory Services. Through cross-functional collaboration, these members developed a scalable, AI-powered voice agent that delivers reliable answers on sales and support-related questions. 

In under three days, Team W.E.S. delivered a project that has the ability to improve ticket resolution times, response times, and customer satisfaction scores.

Stitching the Future award

The Stitching the Future award (a.k.a our “Executive award”) was given to the team whose project caught the eye of WP Engine’s Chief Technology Officer, Ramadass Prabhakar. 

Team GreenSwitch won this award for their work on Evolve WPods, where they focused on improving WP Engine’s core webstack pod deployment process to enable modern, zero-downtime deployments.

This team converted WP Engine’s current K8S deployment process into a faster, safer blue-green deployment process. What does this mean? Pods run the software that serves customer websites. Currently, when WP Engine deploys an update to our customers, there is about one minute of downtime. 

To mitigate this, Team GreenSwitch built a blue-green deployment system that gradually releases traffic and can run even if there is an issue. A blue-green deployment system has two pods running at the same time, allowing traffic from one pod to be easily transferred to the other if there is an issue. This type of deployment allows for the new pod to boot up in the background while the current pod serves traffic. 

Once the new pod is ready, traffic can be shifted over without any downtime. This new process has the potential to reduce the risk of bad deployments and improve our customers’ experiences by minimizing downtime. 

The Single Nine award

The “Single Nine” award was given to a team that had a truly elegant idea that could not be completed by the end of Hackathon. 

Team “The Usual Suspects” used Monte Carlo (a platform that provides visibility into the health and quality of data) and a custom analysis function to automatically diagnose site performance issues. This system would enable WP Engine to solve performance issues faster, decreasing downtime for our customers and their sites. 

This project was completed post-Hackathon and is now used to standardize and automate the detection of common problems, a.k.a “the usual suspects,” in any system performance issues.

Jeremy Stamp of AI-pproval award

VP of Product Jeremy Pollock picked the winner for this award, selecting a project that checks his “AI-pproval” boxes. In other words, it’s the project with the best use of AI. 

This year, Team “Page Against the Machine” won for an innovative take on performance insights. 

Their project developed a method for users to run a detailed analysis on a specific URL from their website to determine opportunities for performance improvements or corrections. With the addition of AI, this tool provides users with actionable insights and information to enhance their website experience. This project is currently in production and will soon be shipped out to our customers!

A focus on culture: Our ERG awards

Two of our awards were judged by WP Engine’s Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), which are employee-led communities that foster a diverse and inclusive workplace.

Green with Envy award

The “Green with Envy” award was judged by our Refresh ERG, an employee resource group focused on sustainability, and was given to the most environmentally friendly project.

Team Route 99 won for their project “All Roads Lead to Rome,” which serves as a proof of concept for replacing WPE’s current server-side routing with a client-side routing solution. 

This proof of concept reduces an application’s overall server load and data transfer requirements, improving performance and reducing energy consumption. Their project enables faster page transitions and a better user experience for the “My Sites” and “Environment Overview” pages in the User Portal.

Inclusive Innovation award

The Inclusive Innovation award was judged by WP Engine’s Embrace ERG. This ERG focuses on advocacy and support of visible, invisible, and chronic disabilities and illnesses at WP Engine. 

Team WPE Compass created an app that enables WP Engine employees to simply look up a domain and find all of the account information in one place. Prior to this project, employees who needed to access account details had to search across multiple databases for potentially relevant information. 

Team WPE Compass’ app delivers a solution that uses a domain as input and instantly receives relevant account information. This innovative solution delivers better accessibility for all WP Engine employees.

Hackathon prizes

For each hackathon, WP Engine makes a donation to the philanthropy of each winning team’s choice. This year, WP Engine donated to the following charities at the behest of our winners: 

• Team W.E.S donated $2,500 to No Kid Hungry. 
• Team Greenswitch donated $2,000 to the Central Texas Food Bank.
• Team The Usual Suspects donated $1,009 to the Central Texas Food Bank.
• Team Page Against the Machine donated $1,500 to the Children’s Grief Centre.
• Team Route 99 donated $500 to Fundacja Wolne Rzeki.
• Team WPE Compass Application donated $500 to Treefolks.

Celebrating every hackathon project

Although only six teams won awards, all participating teams used creativity and innovation to make an impact. Here is a quick rundown of the rest of the teams and their projects:

• Team AI Tailor: This team used AI to analyze logs and improve the performance and reliability of headless applications.
• Team WPE Smart Onboarding: This team created an AI-powered onboarding experience that helps new customers migrate their first site to WP Engine.
• Team Weaver: This team delivered a low-code app builder that helps developers create AI-powered web experiences using WP Engine content, platform APIs, and LLMs.
• Team Perco-Later: Project Perco-Later replaced existing Percona databases with Google Cloud SQL for improved availability and easy maintenance.
• Team Focus: This team created a “focus” mode that helps customers accomplish daily tasks in Portal.
• Team Five: Created a solution that improves the “add sites” functionality in Portal.
• Team Valencia: Project Valencia focused on building a design system for WP Engine’s plugin ecosystem.
• Team CrossSwords: This team used AI to create WP Engine-themed crossword puzzles to increase employee engagement with our culture and values.
• Team WP Engine Plugin Development Toolkit: Streamlined plugin development through the creation of a toolkit that enforces coding standards and best practices.
• Team Back Dat SiteUp: This team improved reliability and provided proactive insights by introducing observable backup metrics.

Increasing Reliability and Scalability

Although WP Engine hackathons typically last three days, each participating team produced meaningful, creative work that improves reliability and scalability. These events provide opportunities for employees from all departments to offer their perspectives and develop new proofs of concept that we use to improve WP Engine’s hosting platform and tools.

If you’re looking for a role that provides opportunities to creatively tackle new challenges, check out our open roles!