For the past three years at Lookout we’ve hosted an event called “Hacksgiving.” Historically the event has been focused on cool hacks typically oriented around projects or ideas that are internal to Lookout. The first year, for example, a colleague and I prototyped the messaging system that would power our business product the following year. Another group of hackers created the precursor to our signal flare feature that same year (hif I’m remembering correctly).

This year I figured I’d try something different: Open Hacksgiving. I’m going to spend the hackathon hacking on open source projects and updating the status of those projects here.

I’ll also be lurking in this gitter.im chat if you’re feeling bored or want to suggest some issues from GitHub for me to hack on.

Updates

  • (13:17 PDT) Concluding the live blogging, and am going to spend some time writing up docs and what not. Happy Hacksgiving!
  • (12:09 PDT) Further testing on different machines exposed this bug (#503) in Ratpack, forcing a requirement of JDK8 :(
  • (11:22 PDT) Cut the v0.1.0 release of Offtopic!. Threw an installation of it on my workstation to display a big stream of events in the offics
  • (10:29 PDT) Verified that Offtopic! and the multipass feature works for monitoring a number of topics in a Real Usecase™ at Lookout.
  • (09:12 PDT) Coffee made, mail read, picking up where I left off last night with some more interesting functionality in Offtopic.
  • (08:30 PDT) Traveling back to the office with more ideas kicking around in my head on how to make Offtopic more gooder.. Turns out testing something that depends on Zookeeper and Kafka being available isn’t that great on the bus
  • Day Two
  • (23:31 PDT) Not much more cogent thought going into my hacking tonight, heading home
  • (23:23 PDT) Hacked some pretty start/stop buttons into the web UI for Offtopic to connect/disconnect the websocket.
  • (23:01 PDT) Manage to implement grepping/filtering messages coming through to Offtopic
  • (22:19 PDT) Implemented wildcards, hurrah!
  • (21:46 PDT) Starting to figure out topic wildcards to Offtopic!
  • (21:08 PDT) Finished watching The Fifth Element with some coworkers, managed to combining Kafka topic streams implemented!
  • (17:53 PDT) Finished up a few more Offtopic! tasks. Feeling confident in my ability to figure out problems with Groovy now
  • (17:35 PDT) Recovering from a distraction of real work over another beer. Managed to stave off responsibility for another day or two.
  • (16:34 PDT) Beer finished, still chugging away on “Offtopic!”, refactoring a lot of the messy code that I wrote in anger yesterday
  • (15:51 PDT) Planned a bit of work on Offtopic after discussing some useful features with coworkers who also want more visibility into Kafka streams
  • (15:36 PDT) Moved downstairs to the kitchen area at Lookout, poured myself a beer to celebrate conquering some Gradle work.
  • (15:01 PDT) Managed to get a v0.1.3 release of the jruby-gradle-war-plugin with all my good fixes. Demo app published as hellowarld
  • (14:46 PDT) Finally figured out my issue, it turns out that using Vim to inspect the .war files was a stupid idea because Vim caches the buffers for files within the Zip file, deceiving me into thinking my changes weren’t actually working! smashes keyboard
  • (13:45 PDT) Had to abandon my previous approach of getting a bundled web.xml inserted into the war file. Somehow I’m now generating a .war file with a web.xml file that doesn’t match anything in my current source tree. GHOST XMLS
  • (12:23 PDT) Thanks to this stackoverflow post I’ve at least got a path forward to fixing the aforementioned issue of bundling resources inside my Gradle plugin. Somehow I broke my zips somewhere around here: > java.util.zip.ZipException: too many length or distance symbols
  • (11:43 PDT) Slowing down on progress, trying to resolve this issue, which requires Gradle plugin hacking that I’ve not done before
  • (11:16 PDT) Managed to get a Gradle-built version of hellowarld loaded and executing properly inside of Jetty 8
  • (10:54 PDT) jruby-gradle-war-plugin properly building executable .war files with embedded gems.
  • (10:26 PDT) Unblocked coworker with some Gradle hacking, back to my own hackz0ring!
  • (09:59 PDT) Context-switch to help another developer use jruby-gradle for their hackathon project.
  • (09:25 PDT) Break-time over, back to baking .war files with Gradle
  • (09:15 PDT) Found some breakfast burritos downstairs, burrito break!
  • (08:30 PDT) Writing the live blog post. Coffee made, jruby-gradle-war-plugin selected as the first project to tinker with.