Humans of HTB
R&D team meetup #3: United we stand!
A breakdown of technology initiatives, lessons learned, and experiences from our third R&D Meetup in July!
duckarcher,
Jul 31
2024
Table of Contents
We celebrated our third R&D Meetup at Hack The Box (HTB) from the 1st-5th of July! Our goal apart from team bonding was to talk about initiatives, ideas and our HTB future in a new era where the Product, Infra, Engineering, and QA teams work more closely than ever before.
As always, we improved our overall domain knowledge by sharing insights with each other and increased our awareness regarding new initiatives that came from SRE, data engineering, and QA teams which will bring tremendous benefits to our daily work.
The meetup was split into five (5) days. The pillars of the meetup included planning, innovation, knowledge sharing, workshops and bonding.
In this post, we’ll share a summary of the technology subjects we talked about and fun activities the team enjoyed throughout each day.
Day 1: Planning
The first day was dedicated to planning. We started by celebrating our victories, and then got to the fun stuff: planning our goals for the upcoming year. The day concluded with us sharing those goals amongst the teams and everyone expressing a vote of confidence in the plan. Gerasimos Marketos, our SVP of Product, along with Panagiotis Vagenas, VP of Engineering at Hack The Box facilitated the planning.
"Plans are nothing; planning is everything." The dynamic process of planning at HTB, fueled by a passionate and dedicated team, is our secret for turning strategies into success and opening doors to achieving greater milestones.
Gerasimos Marketos, SVP of Product at Hack The Box
Day 2: A new distributed era
Our SRE and Data Engineering teams introduced us to the new era of our systems with initiatives that will elevate our environments and work. Then the Architecture team got their hands dirty with workshops that shared insights on the team’s past work and future adventures.
Day 3: Data, processes, and security
This day was packed with powerful presentations regarding our processes and use of tools (from “daily drivers” to more specialized AI solutions. We took a glimpse into the future of logging, did a product driven-analysis to enhance monitoring, and finally had a workshop on how to defend our organization from a possible hack (DnD style!).
Day 4: The HTB future
This day was dedicated to our HTB ecosystem and its future. We talked about our vision for an elevated gamified experience with accessibility being one of our top priorities so everyone is included in this new era. The fun didn’t stop there though! Talks regarding technologies, methodologies, and quality via testing solidified our vision and set the first milestone of this long but amazing journey.
Being part of Hack The Box is like working at the cutting edge of the future. It's inspiring to witness so many talented individuals pioneering new ways that redefine cybersecurity Training. It's incredibly fulfilling to contribute to projects that empower our community of professionals to better safeguard our digital lives. At HTB, we’re not just observing the future of cybersecurity—we're creating it.
Panagiotis Vagenas, VP of Engineering at Hack The Box
Day 5: Bonding
The last day finished with a bang! We marched inside our old and new offices, visiting each corner and talking with each other in person. We relaxed, laughed, enjoyed lunch and thanks to our awesome Pavlos Kolios, CTF Product Manager at Hack The Box, we participated in an epic CTF competition with “Web” category challenges that were ideal for sharpening our security knowledge.
On the last day, we returned to the office. With colleagues coming from various locations for the meetup, we took the chance to give them a tour of the office space. A major highlight was the Codebreakers CTF 2024, a custom CTF for the Engineering Meetup. As soon as it started, you could see colleagues teaming up and diving into the challenges with genuine excitement. At the end of the day, we headed to the game room where table tennis and foosball matches took place. Fortunately, the room is soundproof, ensuring no disruption to the rest of the office.
Talin Apkarian, Frontend Architect at Hack The Box
Our third meetup event was a blast! The teams shared knowledge with each other, had fun with our workshops and time together, and paved the future towards our new adventures. Looking forward to the next one!
