TouK Hackathon – March 2019

Hackathons are prone to fail. It’s because we have very little time to create something useful, actually working and making a wow!-effect.

So this time we wanted to run “THE HACKATHON”, a well-prepared event with a very high success rate. We called it “Ship IT!” to ensure that we will focus on delivering a working product, not only on having fun while making it. We formed an organising team responsible for internal communication, collecting the needs, removing obstacles and buying some snacks and pizza for the event itself.

We thought that if we want to succeed, we’ll have to prepare well. So each team gathered before the event and talked about their plans, the technologies they intend to use and what hardware they need to order. The organizers met with all teams, exchanged details and gave some good advice.

And finally, the day has come! Seven teams started the two-day hacking session at 9AM, continued until 5PM, and showed the demos of all seven projects after 4.30PM on the second day. We gathered 25 participants total.

Here is a quick presentation of the projects we delivered.

Lidar/ROS.org based robot

robot image We always wanted to build a fully autonomous vehicle to transport sandwiches and monitor the Wi-Fi quality over the whole office space. The first step we took was creating a remote controlled platform with Lidar, which allowed to build the office map and made a foundation for future experiments. We reached this goal with ROS.org and mapped a few corridors and rooms in our office at the end of the hackathon. Now we’re almost ready to conquer Mars :D

Quak Liero-like Game

quak team Quak is a PvP platform game inspired by Liero or Soldat. We used a mix of Kotlin, libGDX and box2d (physics) to build a good-looking 2D game in less than 2 days. Destructible level as a mesh of boxes are generated from provided png layers. Additionally, we implemented some extras to diversify the player experience, such as multiple weapons, double jump, blood effects and explosions.

Quiz Game

quiz game DuckQuiz is a game we wanted to use at public event, e.g. conferences. It’s a little bit similar to the legendary Flappy Bird. Your goal is to make the title hero – a duck – go as far as possible! Correct answers give the duck a bump, so the more questions you answer correctly, the further the duck will go. Be careful, though! Three wrong answers will make a brick fall on the duck’s head! To spice things up a little, we decided to introduce a score threshold, which – once achieved – guaranteed a prize. Plus, of course, if you beat the highest score, you will make history as the reigning champion Duck Flyer. The quiz application is written in Kotlin for Android. We used RxJava and Retrofit for communication with the server. For the back-end side, we chose SpringBoot along with Kotlin. There is also a web-based “Hall of Fame” panel and a simple CMS which allows the management of the quiz questions, written in ReactJS.

Own Card Authorization system

demo4 We’re waiting for our private brand new vending machine which we’re going to use for distribution of snacks in Touk. We’ve noticed that we can communicate with it using MDB protocol. We’d like to authenticate in the machine with RFID cards which are commonly used in TouK to open doors. As a first step, we wanted to create authorization system based on RFID cards, but with additional PIN verification part added. Our system should be integrated with internal LDAP. We’ve separated our project into 4 modules: backend (spring boot), web frontend (scalajs-react), mobile app (android) and hardware device (arduino yun). Backend part connects all modules and allows matching RFID cards UID with LDAP logins. Web frontend is designed for users to set and manage their PINs. The mobile app at the moment is dedicated for our administrator to make pairing existing cards with LDAP logins easier. Finally, hardware device was created to read data from card, get PIN from user and check if PIN is correct (via backend). In the next step, we’d like to integrate our system with mentioned vending machine and make payments using it. There is also a plan to enhance mobile app and use it as mobile payment terminal and integrate web UI with Touk SelfCare system.

Notification lights

lights hackers Three suites (3 lights in red, yellow and blue) controlled by Raspberry Pi Zero W communicating with the managing service via MQTT protocol. The service handles messages from Rocket’s (our chat) outgoing web hooks and notifications from GitLab (e.g. opened merge requests).

Team gathering app (e.g. for football matches)

Team gathering app We regularly play football and volleyball after work, but we sometimes struggle with completing the teams. So far, we used a sign-up system based on Confluence pages, which is not mobile-friendly. We also wanted to allow registration for “reserve” players from outside the company. That’s why we built a simple mobile app with a sign-up form, game history and basic player ranking. The app was built with Dart using the Flutter framework and Firebase for storage and authorization.

Internal time reporting API

This HR project’s goal was to integrate and simplify the way we log time in our company. We’ve achieved that with a Google Calendar-like GUI and multiple microservices written in TypeScript, Python, Java and Scala!

The Grand Finale

demo1 At the end of “Ship IT!”, the teams had demonstrated the effects of their work. They shared some successes and other stories :) about the used software and hardware and the lessons learned during those two intensive days. The audience were amused when the robot started to explore the room. The Quak team had a bloody battle in their game. The lights were blinking when one of the team members wrote “kanapki” on our internal TouK chat.

demo2 demo3 demo5 demo6

It was very impressive that each team managed to deliver a viable result and show their projects in action. We can’t wait to run the next edition of The TouK Hackahton and hope there will be even more participants and surprising ideas to see.

DDevelopment & Design

33rd Degree day 1 review

byJakub Nabrdalik
March 24, 2012

33rd Degree is over. After the one last year, my expectations were very high, but Grzegorz Duda once again proved he's more than able to deliver. With up to five tracks (most of the time: four presentations + one workshop), and ~650 attendees, there was a lot to see and a lot to do, thus everyone will probably have a little bit different story to tell. Here is mine.

Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM

Raffi Krikorian talking about Twitter and JVM

The conference started with Raffi Krikorian from Twitter, talking about their use for JVM. Twitter was build with Ruby but with their performance management a lot of the backend was moved to Scala, Java and Closure. Raffi noted, that for Ruby programmers Scala was easier to grasp than Java, more natural, which is quite interesting considering how many PHP guys move to Ruby these days because of the same reasons. Perhaps the path of learning Jacek Laskowski once described (Java -> Groovy -> Scala/Closure) may be on par with PHP -> Ruby -> Scala. It definitely feels like Scala is the holy grail of languages these days.

Raffi also noted, that while JVM delivered speed and a concurrency model to Twitter stack, it wasn't enough, and they've build/customized their own Garbage Collector. My guess is that Scala/Closure could also be used because of a nice concurrency solutions (STM, immutables and so on).

Raffi pointed out, that with the scale of Twitter, you easily get 3 million hits per second, and that means you probably have 3 edge cases every second. I'd love to learn listen to lessons they've learned from this.

Complexity of Complexity

The second keynote of the first day, was Ken Sipe talking about complexity. He made a good point that there is a difference between complex and complicated, and that we often recognize things as complex only because we are less familiar with them. This goes more interesting the moment you realize that the shift in last 20 years of computer languages, from the "Less is more" paradigm (think Java, ASM) to "More is better" (Groovy/Scala/Closure), where you have more complex language, with more powerful and less verbose syntax, that is actually not more complicated, it just looks less familiar.

So while 10 years ago, I really liked Java as a general purpose language for it's small set of rules that could get you everywhere, it turned out that to do most of the real world stuff, a lot of code had to be written. The situation got better thanks to libraries/frameworks and so on, but it's just patching. New languages have a lot of stuff build into, which makes their set of rules and syntax much more complex, but once you get familiar, the real world usage is simple, faster, better, with less traps laying around, waiting for you to fall.

Ken also pointed out, that while Entity Service Bus looks really simple on diagrams, it's usually very difficult and complicated to use from the perspective of the programmer. And that's probably why it gets chosen so often - the guys selling/buying it, look no deeper than on the diagram.

Pointy haired bosses and pragmatic programmers: Facts and Fallacies of Software Development

Dima got lucky. Or maybe not.

Venkat Subramaniam is the kind of a speaker that talk about very simple things in a way, which makes everyone either laugh or reflect. Yes, he is a showman, but hey, that's actually good, because even if you know the subject quite well, his talks are still very entertaining.

This talk was very generic (here's my thesis: the longer the title, the more generic the talk will be), interesting and fun, but at the end I'm unable to see anything new I'd have learned, apart from the distinction between Dynamic vs Static and Strong vs Weak typing, which I've seen the last year, but managed to forgot. This may be a very interesting argument for all those who are afraid of Groovy/Ruby, after bad experience with PHP or Perl.

Build Trust in Your Build to Deployment Flow!

Frederic Simon talked about DevOps and deployment, and that was a miss in my schedule, because of two reasons. First, the talk was aimed at DevOps specifically, and while the subject is trendy lately, without big-scale problems, deployment is a process I usually set up and forget about. It just works, mostly because I only have to deal with one (current) project at a time.

Not much love for Dart.

Second, while Frederic has a fabulous accent and a nice, loud voice, he tends to start each sentence loud and fade the sound at the end. This, together with mics failing him badly, made half of the presentation hard to grasp unless you were sitting in the first row.

I'm not saying the presentation was bad, far from it, it just clearly wasn't for me.

I've left a few minutes before the end, to see how many people came to Dart presentation by Mike West. I was kind of interested, since I'm following Warsaw Google Technology User Group and heard a few voices about why I should pay attentions to that new Google language. As you can see from the picture on the right, the majority tends to disagree with that opinion.

Non blocking, composable reactive web programming with Iteratees

Sadek Drobi's talk about Iteratees in Play 2.0 was very refreshing. Perhaps because I've never used Play before, but the presentation was flawless, with well explained problems, concepts and solutions.

Sadek started with a reflection on how much CPU we waste waiting for IO in web development, then moved to Play's Iteratees, to explain the concept and implementation, which while very different from the that overused Request/Servlet model, looked really nice and simple. I'm not sure though, how much the problem is present when you have a simple service, serving static content before your app server. Think apache (and faster) before tomcat. That won't fix the upload/download issue though, which is beautifully solved in Play 2.0

The Future of the Java Platform: Java SE 8 & Beyond

Simon Ritter is an intriguing fellow. If you take a glance at his work history (AT&T UNIX System Labs -> Novell -> Sun -> Oracle), you can easily see, he's a heavy weight player.

His presentation was rich in content, no corpo-bullshit. He started with a bit of history of JCP and how it looks like right now, then moved to the most interesting stuff, changes. Now I could give you a summary here, but there is really no point: you'd be much better taking look at the slides. There are only 48 of them, but everything is self-explanatory.

To Java SE 8 and Beyond! | Simon Ritter

While I'm very disappointed with the speed of changes, especially when compared to the C# world, I'm glad with the direction and the fact that they finally want to BREAK the compatibility with the broken stuff (generics, etc.). Moving to other languages I guess I won't be the one to scream "My god, finally!" somewhere in 2017, though. All the changes together look very promising, it's just that I'd like to have them like... now? Next year max, not near the heat death of the universe.

Simon also revealed one of the great mysteries of Java, to me:

The original idea behind JNI was to make it hard to write, to discourage people form using it.

On a side note, did you know Tegra3 has actually 5 cores? You use 4 of them, and then switch to the other one, when you battery gets low.

BOF: Spring and CloudFoundry

Having most of my folks moved to see "Typesafe stack 2.0" fabulously organized by Rafał Wasilewski and Wojtek Erbetowski (with both of whom I had a pleasure to travel to the conference) and knowing it will be recorded, I've decided to see what Josh Long has to say about CloudFoundry, a subject I find very intriguing after the de facto fiasco of Google App Engine.

The audience was small but vibrant, mostly users of Amazon EC2, and while it turned out that Josh didn't have much, with pricing and details not yet public, the fact that Spring Source has already created their own competition (Could Foundry is both an Open Source app and a service), takes a lot from my anxiety.

For the review of the second day of the conference, go here.