Synthesis recently held its first 24-hour hackathon of 2019. The theme of this hackathon was building out tooling and ideas onto of the Synthesis custom Kubernetes distribution called Polaris.
The Computer Vision team built a tool to turn scanned diagrams into vector drawings using AWS Rekognition. Then the Visual CI team built a handy tool to visualize Kubernetes configurations and tooling. By using a drag and drop interface it enabled the configuration of a cluster but also assisted with getting the health status of nodes and their associated logs.
The Office Lens team built a tool to make it easier to activate and deactivate the office alarm. The tool streamed video to Kinesis to do image recognition to see if an employee was in the office, after which it would either arm or disarm the alarm. The Bob the Polaris Android team built a tool that could process voice and images to answer questions and could also check a user’s email. The Realtime 360 team built a tool to tackle the hard problem of having a single view of a customer in an organization that has highly segregated data.
The Journey Scout team built a tool where a destination could be entered and it would crawl Google Street View and highlight interesting sights along the way. The team used a fan out lambda pattern for the street view images and then used AWS Rekognition to do image analysis on these images after which it was presented on a front end for the user to observe.
The Fancy Flowlogs team built a tool to enrich VPC Flow Logs with CloudTrail events, making it easier to understand logs as they are ingested. The team built a streaming architecture using Lambda, SQS, Kubernetes, Kafka, ElasticSearch and Kibana. The enriched data was ingested into ElasticSearch and presented with various Kibana dashboards.
Apart from building out these projects, there were several fun competitions between the hackathon teams to test their non-coding capabilities such as music gaming on Virtual Reality (VR) and first-person shooting games on PlayStation. However, the event that attracted the most attention was the nerf war that took place between teams. The hundreds of nerf bullets that spanned the office told the story of the nail-biting battles that took place. Congratulations to team Realtime 360 for winning the Nerf war and to team Office Lens that came 2nd.
Congratulations to the Fancy Flowlogs team who were the overall winners of the hackathon and to Journey Scout that came 2nd. The Fancy Flowlogs team will be receiving tickets to the DevConf conference and the Journey Scout team received headphones.
We look forward to the next hackathon later this year!
By: Jared Naude, Synthesis Software Technologies
