Hack 22 – March 2022

The 2 Year Anniversary!!!

This was our 2-year anniversary remote hack, and it was a smashing success, by all accounts! All the usual drama was afoot, with makeshift non-alpine holidays, murder mysteries, palette clensers, and even a nailbiting match result against the Docker Dangermice (TL;DR - they won…again).

Admittedly, at the inception of the Remote Hack, I think we expected it to grow to involve many more people, and have pursued several initiatives to see about doing just that…we’ve settled into a bit more of a relaxed and comfortable core-group chill room sort of vibe, and that’s absolutely fine!

…Which isn’t at ALL to say that we don’t welcome new-comers…we most assuredly do! It’s just that 2 years on, nobody would have expected it to grow and develop like this from the outset, but that’s life in these small mountain towns!

Sometimes people just show up for 30 minutes to chat and do nothing, and that’s what the remotehack vibe has developed into, a very organic growth into #treat-yoself, which means sometimes you don’t “accomplish” anything, but that’s totally cool!

On to the next year of remote hacks!!!

Things People Did

• Panda and Ben Immediately dived into a complex dev environment set up, using remote VS Code connections to gitpod, and to be fair, this particular hack did have a heavy gitpod flavour. But anyway, their project was connecting audio to physical movements of phones, patching into the gyroscopes, and generally being one of the more enjoyable demos we’ve had. The fact that Ben had to cancel, at the last minute, his planned trip to remote hack from the alps, didn’t slow down this team one bit…though to be fair, even a poor remote hack while in the alps, is prettttttttttty pretttttty good.

• Adam finished authoring a TCPDump murder mystery, involving the case of the sluggish webapp, where 5 containers spin up (in gitpod, naturally) and flood an express web app with http requests. The task of the detective is to use tcpdump (pre-installed in the gitpod config) to find which container is sending too many requests and stop it so the webapp can respond quickly again. https://github.com/lpmi-13/tcpdump-mystery

• Ruth continued development on a palette generator to be used as input for another completely different product, effectively painting her own dogfood. But the BIG news was her recent trip to Paris was tres fab, and she might actually be going back more often to chill at the Mozilla offices there.

• Gabor joined us late in the day to tell tales of his exploits against the Docker home team. The lesson learned was to never play Docker in their home stadium, as he was left with an unfortunate final score of : Docker - 1, Gabor - 0. Will he have his revenge during the third year of the remote hack…? Most assuredly!