Hack 16 – July 2021

Another relaxed hack day was had by all, especially Adam who took an Airquotes sabattical. Tune in next time for more hackside chats and microcasts.

We trialled Discord for video chat, breakout rooms and generally wondering if it could be better than Slack. The experiment was mostly successful, and other than some faulty invite links it all went smoothly. Maybe we’ll move across completely for the next one.

Things people did

• Anna and Adam paired up to hack a JavaScript site on Netlify. It was Anna’s first time joining the remotehack, and she produced something that worked by lunch. Phenomenal job! Her site is here.

• Gabor hacked his field microphone to make it motorbike-safe, and showed us his keyboard collection.

• Panda generated music from dance with accelerometers, or maybe gyroscopes, in his phone.

• Ryan started hacking on a BangleJS watch before getting sidetracked and spending most of the day chatting, which is pretty much the same as every hack day.

• Pete built the Taj Mahal with tiny robots, and did some code archaeology.

• We all talked about networking, interviews, unexpected cloud bills, Kubernetes, and the benefits of review, trunk-based-development and mob programming. Apart from the bit where Adam couldn’t remember the Unix version of the ip route command, it went smashingly!