Hack 36 – April 2023

The April of our full content! We had a great time mostly chatting, but also flexing on projects that had no great demonstrable value, but phenomenal interest and payoff for all involved!

Things people did

• Hugh started off the day in high spirits, and mused about updating a physical contraption to obey more physics laws, despite not knowing any himself. He later retretreated to the cold comfort of merely flashing hardware, realising about an hour too late that he’d been flashing the wrong piece of hardware all along.

• Adam was updating his erstwhile golang + React micromaterial for JQ practice and decided that instead of making it a CLI tool, he would just put it on the public internet behind some websockets. It was eventually (as in, like, a day later) deduced that despite previously having held the professional title of Senior Frontend Engineer, he had forgotten all about how React actually worked, and was initialising a new websocket connection with each re-render. VERY BAD. (postscript: the thing is finally live and much less buggy). https://jkew.party

• Joe Continued the great journey of Tiddlywiki, striving to convert us to the ways of the single page everything, but once it was clear we weren’t buying, he changed not only tact but also tack and did some weird stuff with Godot and a 20-sided die.

• Pete burst on the scene a bit later in the day, but upon hearing all of our shamefully narrow-scoped initiatives, immediately threw himself into re-implementing React, but better, and he actually made some stuff that worked. At time of writing, the status of his spin-off slimmed down React re-implementation project Peteact, is unknown.