HashiCorp Vault wins OSCON 2018 Breakout Project of the Year Award

Jeff Mitchell, the author of this post, was Vault's lead engineer from August 2015 to June 2018, and now serves as principal engineer in HashiCorp's Secure division.

Three years ago, while attending OSCON 2015, I was interviewing for a position at a tiny company with less than two dozen employees called, improbably, HashiCorp. Soon after OSCON ended I was offered a job, and a few weeks later I walked into the single room HashiCorp rented in a much larger office. There I was told that I was to be the first full-time employee on a project still in its infancy called Vault.

I had contributed to Vault several times before joining the company, and was enamored with the ideas behind it. These included security concepts like default-deny, zero-trust, short-lived secrets, and encrypt everything, but more importantly there was a focus on the practitioner and working to make enhancing your security as accessible as possible. Not everything was perfect -- nothing ever is -- but it was the first piece of security software that ever spoke to me at a gut level, and one of the few pieces of software that has ever made me think "there's something really special going on here." Sometimes you just know magic when you see it.

What I never expected was the extent to which that feeling would resonate with and be echoed by others. Vault's growth and adoption over the last three years has been nothing short of incredible, and every single day I am proud to be working with the stellar and passionate Vault team at HashiCorp and the engaged community that is always pushing us to do better and to never stop thinking about how to keep that magic alive.

I literally could not have imagined, watching the 2015 OSCON Awards honorees being announced, that only a few years later this tiny project called Vault would itself be on the receiving end. On behalf of the Vault team, and HashiCorp as a whole, my sincerest thanks to O'Reilly for the nomination and to everyone who voted to make Vault the winner of the OSCON 2018 Breakout Project of the Year Award. It will forever be a bright spot in our memories, and we will keep striving to live up to the expectations of those that made it happen.

Finally, I want to recognize Vault's fellow nominees. They are all amazing projects, and I highly recommend checking all of them out if you are not familiar with them already:

• Prettier
• Vue
• HyperLedger
• Jupyter
• .NET Core

Thanks once again...and we'll continue working hard to help you keep your secrets and keep them safe.