Hack 48 – April 2024

This one was all about the suspense and mystery of hackday disappearances. It’s also an open question as to whether we can make “saasafrass” happen as a term for completely fake saas businesses that are stood up in a week for the express purposes of demo-ing that somebody is running “production” services on EKS…

But more to the point of the hackday milieu…twas getting sunnier, and the pull of nice weather and strong coffee pulled participants in multiple directions. Nevertheless, we persisted.

Things people did

Piers accomplished the most, researching how to read from the LiDAR_LD06 Okdo Lidar Hat Module using MicroPython. He also attended a football tournament, and achieved the much vaunted triple crown hackday of tech, hardware and physical activity.
Ryan gave sage advice, as always, and assisted Adam in some Postgres container hacking, then got stuck making “a brew”, which we’re still unsure as to whether he was referring to coffee or tea…since he never came back.
Joe studied a bunch of famines, in a splendid display of academic hackery, but neglected to enlighten us with the collective noun for “famines”…but I’m personally hoping it’s “a yaml of famines”.
Adam made great progress in his attempts to run EKS “in production”, by which he means standing up a completely fake but technically public and totally free Saas company to dispense fake information about other made-up Saas companies. Most of it was yaml hacking, and he eventually got it running at mytotallyserioussaasbusiness.com
Hugh very likely successfully invented a time machine, since he mentioned definitely hacking and then disappeared. It’s also possible that he got distracted by needing to fix exactly one thing on his bike and got sidetracked in a wacky re-enactment of the Malcolm in the Middle scene featuring Bryan Cranston fixing a lightbulb.
Piers re-emerged on Sunday to declare a hackweekend double-header, putting Adam’s EKS cluster to shame via the simple expedient of running Django on EC2 with a Vue frontend. Delicious.