Hackapella 5: Hack to the Future

Earlier this month, Hackapella 5.0, officially dubbed “Hackapella 5: Hack to the Future,” brought innovation, creativity, and collaboration to the forefront at Capella Space. This annual internal hackathon is a cherished tradition, giving employees two days to break free from their regular routines and bring bold ideas to life. From AI breakthroughs to hardware hacks, this year’s projects demonstrated how we continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible.

What is Hackapella?

Hackapella is an opportunity for everyone at Capella to take time away from their regular work to explore an idea—big or small—related to Capella's mission. Whether working solo or teaming up (which is way more fun, if you ask us), participants use these two days to innovate and experiment without limits.

The only requirement? Bring your creativity. Anything is fair game, from tools to improve internal processes to advancements in SAR technology—or even quirky art projects. Participants also have the chance to tackle sponsored Bounties for additional recognition and prizes. The hackathon culminates with final presentations, where projects are shared, and prizes—including the coveted Best Project Award—are handed out.

The Winning Project: "On-Prem LLM"

This year’s Grand Prize went to "On-Prem LLM" by Craig Stringham and Scott Shambaugh. Recognizing Capella’s unique challenges in adopting external AI tools due to legal constraints, the team took on the ambitious task of building an internal Large Language Model (LLM). Much like the technology behind ChatGPT, this LLM was connected to local code editors, enabling AI-driven code quality checks and auto-completion. Their work demonstrated a potentially massive boost to developer productivity, earning them the top spot and their names etched on the Hackapella Board of Fame in Capella’s San Francisco office.

The Bounty Winners

Hackapella isn’t just about the Grand Prize—this year’s Bounty winners also delivered incredible ideas that spanned AI, hardware, and SAR innovation.

• QA by SMS ("Rest Assured QA")
  Second-place overall winners tackled the challenge of late-night quality assurance alerts, developing a system that sends metrics via our internal instant messaging platform to assist with quick decisions, saving processing teams some valuable sleep.
• Hardware Hack ("Set Phasers to Stun")
  By combining multiple Talon units with a Magic Tee, this team doubled the power of Capella’s high-bandwidth amplifiers.
• Euler Club Bounty ("ASAP SLC Generation")
  Streaming raw data directly into the GPU, this project laid the foundation for near-real-time SAR processing onboard the spacecraft.
• Scrooge McDuck ("On-Prem LLM")
  The overall winner "On-Prem LLM" also claimed this bounty for advancing Capella’s AI capabilities.
• Oompa-Oompa (Secret Art Project)
  Details remain a mystery, but this project epitomized the fun and creativity Hackapella inspires.
• Mr. Tidy ("The Rotisserie")
  This team designed a fixture to simplify spacecraft rotation during integration, reducing manual labor and saving our engineers even more time for unique projects.
• Optimizer 9000 ("Are We There Yet?")
  This project used machine learning to predict collect development times and created a slick web interface for easy access.
• Robot Overlords ("Whatch You Talk'n About")
  This AI-driven project generated life-like podcast episodes interpreting SAR data—a playful look at the future of storytelling.
• KonMari ("Lab Mari Kondo")
  This team took on the ambitious task of tidying our lab. We won’t speak of what happened to the office. 😉

Hackapella Through the Years

From its inception, Hackapella has become more than a hackathon—it’s a celebration of creativity, teamwork, and pushing the boundaries of SAR technology. It's an opportunity for Capellians to work with other teams to explore new ideas and see if they work. Past projects have included everything from high-powered amplifiers to SAR image processing innovations and even Capella-themed text-based games.

The trophies and accolades are great, but the real reward lies in seeing ideas flourish. Hackapella is proof that with the right environment, creativity knows no bounds.

Want to Join Hackapella 6?

If Hackapella 5.0 has inspired you, there’s good news—we’re hiring! Be part of the team and bring your innovative ideas to life in next year’s Hackapella 6. Explore open roles on our Careers page and let’s create something incredible together.

Here’s to another unforgettable Hackapella and the bright ideas it has sparked. See you next year!