Elias Hackradt from @cloudron introduced us to their project “Hack the Hackathon” at the CloudFest Hackathon.

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Simon:
What is your project called and what is it all about?

Elias:
Okay, our project is called Hack the Hackathon. The project is a creation.
It sounds like a meta project, actually.

Simon:
It does, yeah.

Elias:
Yeah. We had the idea of how do you do a hackathon?
What’s needed for it? What software do you need? What’s involved with everything?
So we’re from Cloud Run, and we have a platform that makes installation of force-based application on a single server very easy, like with domain management.

Elias:
Backup management, certificates and everything so there was also a very easy starting point like then we just wanted to template everything and then create a one-click installer so people can use it but our project escalated very much because as they do as they do because we have quite a big group of technical and non-technical people.

Elias:
And the one part is doing like the conceptual part they talked to like Carol and everyone else from the CloudFest and got everything that they need to know about like what do you have to do for hosting a hackathon what’s the pre-game what do you need to plan for and everything so there’s a lot of conception involved and now we have like I think maybe four or five A4 pages of like documentation on what you need to do for a hackathon how to get sponsors how to do like accessibility and diversity and everything and then catering with that we have the one-click installer platform that if you want to do a hackathon right now let’s say for example you are a small community of let’s say um a small linux distribution a small a small linux flavor there’s like so many and you want to do a hackathon so what you have to do you have to figure out okay how do we organize it how do we get people how do we get investors sponsors and everything then how do we do the hosting what tools can we use and what’s what needs to be be taken care of and now since we compiled everything from the cloud fest all the knowledge from all the past five six years you can actually just use the guidebook as a reference click the button and then you have all the tools you need you have the mailing client newsletters you have like the chat for everyone internal external and everything ready to go with a very comprehensive guidebook.

Simon:
So let’s let’s reiterate on that you’ve not only used this hackathon to build a tool to to run hackathons, but also compile all the additional information on top, like as you said, with accessibility, what you have to do, and so on.
Interesting.

Elias:
So the idea was that hackathons these days is not mainly 100% technical.
It can also be, for example, if you’re in the medical field or if you have a kindergarten or something like that, you can do something like that as well.
It can be a very social event and not techy at all.
So the hackathon term right now is more like a description on how you gather people together and work in groups together. So we wanted to provide a tool that is easy to use for everyone with like lower resources.
So everyone can benefit from the style of the hackathon.
And since we are the technical people here, our also goal in my mind was, if my mom can use it, it’s user friendly.
So if my mom can use it, read the guide and click the button, and then she can host the hackathon.
That would be perfect. So we tried that.

Simon:
Definitely make it sound easy to run a hackathon now.
I’m very curious where this whole project will lead to. So I’m looking forward to that. Thank you for taking the time.

Elias:
No problem. Thank you for having me.

MariaDB’s Andrew Hutchings (@LinuxJedi) explained their Project: “Integrating MariaDB Catalogs with PHP Platforms” for the CloudFest Hackathon.

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Simon:
Andrew, what is your project called and what is it all about?

Andrew:
Okay, I’m going to try and get the full name of the title correct because we got…

Simon:
Everyone struggles with that.

Andrew:
I believe the title is Integrating MariaDB Catalogs with PHP Frameworks.
So really long, complicated title that probably doesn’t mean anything to most people. So MariaDB Catalogs is a way of containerizing collections of databases and users inside MariaDB Server.
And this means every catalog is isolated. And this means that you can do things such as have a single MariaDB Server for thousands of websites and have a single pool of memory rather than a thousand MariaDB Servers with one gig of RAM consuming lots of resources.
But also, you’ll be able to eventually do things like resource constraints per catalog.
So if you’ve got a low-tier customer, you can set a number of queries per second or something like that that they’re allowed to do versus a high-tier customer that can do a lot more.
So I think it’s great for cloud and web hosting where you’re sharing a lot of resources.
Now, to use it, you obviously need a way of being able to create the catalogs, administer them, looking at statistics of them and things like that.
App. And this is where this project comes in.
So it’s essentially a framework, a library, you can integrate with the admin systems of various CMSs.
So that when you create a new site off of that CMS.

Andrew:
Created it a new catalog, and you’ll be able to kind of drop the catalog with the site and everything like that.
So that’s essentially what this project is. Was that the whole question? I’ve lost track of it.

Simon:
That was the whole way you answered it perfectly. So was all of that in scope for your work this weekend at CloudFest Hackathon?

Andrew:
That was what was originally intended.
Oh, there’s a story here. There’s a story here, yeah.
And I’ll be telling the story at the final presentation. but so readdb catalogs has not been released yet it is a pre-alpha state we were using code ripped out of founder montewidinius’s basement um in finland to actually make it work so there was no binaries we had to actually kind of create a docker image just so we could actually build the thing and actually use it and then when the guys started using it they managed to break it in ways i wasn’t anticipating them so um we spent pretty much the first day just firefighting bugs and things like that so we could actually get the thing running so i spent the first day thinking we’re never going to get anywhere but even if we don’t then watching the team use it is still feedback we can use we can learn from it we can keep moving forward and use that you know it’s still really valuable as it happens in day two we completely knocked it out the park well i didn’t They did.
We got a foundation that worked. We managed to actually build the PHP framework.
We’ve actually got it working with WordPress single site, multi-site, WPCLI and Laravel.

Andrew:
Four GitHub repos so far and possibly a fifth coming.
And so we managed to get there, even though we really were not expecting it at the beginning.
And we’ve opened six tickets in the really big bug tracker for all the issues we found so far.
And I’ll be talking to the rest of the developers later this week to see what we can do to make the experience a little bit better in future for people who before we actually release this as a final project later this year.

Simon:
So it sounds like there’s like some follow up work to do still after the hackathon.

Andrew:
Oh, hell yes. Monty, Vicente, Eric and everyone else who develop it are actually going to be here this week.
So i’ll be meeting with them probably later today and going through with them how i observed it being used in reality compared to how we expect it to be used yeah and see if we can tweak things before we actually get a final release out of the of the really catalogs feature because it is actually a huge feature under it doesn’t it doesn’t look it on the outside but on the inside it’s a huge re-architecting of so many parts of marie db to make it work.

Simon:
This pretty much covers was it thank you for taking the time that was very insightful.

Simon:
Enjoy the rest of the hackathon …

Andrew:
Guess 45 minutes or so yes thank you thank you very much.

Lars Gersmann introduced us to his project “JSON Schema Field/Form Renderer” for the CloudFest Hackathon.

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Simon:
Okay, Lars, what is your project called and what is it all about?

Lars:
It’s called the JSON Schema and Forms Project, and it’s all about the WordPress frontend and JSON Schema.
Right now, frontends in, for example, the settings pages and so on are handwritten using PHP formulas.
So it’s complicated to adapt, for example, another style or even Gutenberg controls and so on. And the second thing is, because it’s hard-coded, you can change the WordPress admin dashboard.
But if you used an abstraction level like JSON Schema to define which settings are required by a form, and the settings can be rendered to the form, then you have two benefits.
You have automatically generated beautiful-looking settings pages and stuff.
And you can even change the look and feel maybe in five years or ten years if the design changes.
And even integration of plugin setting pages or even the WordPress setting pages can be adapted in different systems.
For example, in account pages from hosters and so on.
But you can use it also in Gutenberg.

Simon:
So what is that sounds like? That’s not all. But it’s some of the key points.
It sounds like this is a project that will go on for some time even after the hackathon. what is it you plan on shipping by the end of CloudFest Hackathon?

Lars:
Actually the dream is to actually get it into WordPress Core, in some not actually the code from the Hackathon this is just a proof but it’s amazing what we did in the last two days.
So we get a form renderer, we got inside the WordPress and preview so you type on the JSON schema, which is just a few JSON snippets, and you get immediately rendered the form, including validation and all the stuff.
We did some Gutenberg blocks and so on. So the proof says it all works.
And the next steps would be to get in touch with the right people to create clean code, which can then be contributed to WordPress or to Gutenberg code.

Simon:
So your hackathon project is basically a proof of concept.

Lars:
Right.

Simon:
Okay.

Lars:
And it’s far more on completion than just a product.

Simon:
Thank you for taking the time.

Lars:
Thank you too.