More Hackathoning
Jun. 12th, 2019 11:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nosrednaydujSo I got roped into the big hackathon at my company. It's a huge event, with 200 people from our offices all over the world. We're all on different teams with 3-4 people per team, all working on different projects, some of them directly related to our business, some of them pie in the sky ideas.
Mine is trying to make Apache Ant work well on the IBM mainframe. It currently "works", but there are issues, first with code pages -- that pesky ebcdic -- and secondly there's absolutely no support for legacy IBM datasets, so it only works on the unix side (did you even know IBM mainframes have a unix layer?) We had 4 days, and while we had some success, there's a lot of undone and underdone bits in the code. Tonight we had demos in front of the whole crowd; tomorrow we have "one on one" demos with the CEO. What I don't know is whether we'll get to finish the undone parts afterwards, or if we'll just be back to our regular jobs. I kind of want to connect with Apache and see if they'd even take the code when we're done, and if they have any design ideas better than what we've done, before investing more time in the project.
In order to fully participate, I'm staying in the local hotel with the far-away office people. Pretty much everyone who is local is staying at the hotel. They didn't even get a very good rate. It seems like a huge waste of money, but really, I'd only be here my usual 6 hours a day if I had to commute and live my home life. The hotel is OK, just not worth what they're paying. I wrote some of this too late at night because I knocked the cord out of the alarm clock and it's one of these stupid ones where you need a degree in computer science to operate it. (But wait. I have one of those.) I was afraid it would wake me up at 6 so I just unplugged it again, but then it was hard to get to sleep after that because I was frazzled.
I'm missing out on some interesting chaos at home. Jocelyn's going, by herself, to San Francisco, where she'll visit a friend from middle school who moved there (we've visited once before), and also visit the University of San Francisco and the San Francisco Circus Center, which is one mile from USF. This trip was all planned in the last couple of days, and she leaves tomorrow! I'm sure I would have spent a lot of my home time fussing about it, rather than hacking at work.
Anyway, it's been interesting, but I hope I manage to avoid it next year. Despite the proximity ("live at work" intsead of "work at home") I feel underslept. I brought my bicycle in order to try to get exercie, but mostly only managed 20 minute rides (one day it rained, so I ran on the hotel's elliptical instead). So I also feel somewhat under-exercised.
I hope to take Friday off; I think we're entitled (considering we started all this on Sunday morning!)
Mine is trying to make Apache Ant work well on the IBM mainframe. It currently "works", but there are issues, first with code pages -- that pesky ebcdic -- and secondly there's absolutely no support for legacy IBM datasets, so it only works on the unix side (did you even know IBM mainframes have a unix layer?) We had 4 days, and while we had some success, there's a lot of undone and underdone bits in the code. Tonight we had demos in front of the whole crowd; tomorrow we have "one on one" demos with the CEO. What I don't know is whether we'll get to finish the undone parts afterwards, or if we'll just be back to our regular jobs. I kind of want to connect with Apache and see if they'd even take the code when we're done, and if they have any design ideas better than what we've done, before investing more time in the project.
In order to fully participate, I'm staying in the local hotel with the far-away office people. Pretty much everyone who is local is staying at the hotel. They didn't even get a very good rate. It seems like a huge waste of money, but really, I'd only be here my usual 6 hours a day if I had to commute and live my home life. The hotel is OK, just not worth what they're paying. I wrote some of this too late at night because I knocked the cord out of the alarm clock and it's one of these stupid ones where you need a degree in computer science to operate it. (But wait. I have one of those.) I was afraid it would wake me up at 6 so I just unplugged it again, but then it was hard to get to sleep after that because I was frazzled.
I'm missing out on some interesting chaos at home. Jocelyn's going, by herself, to San Francisco, where she'll visit a friend from middle school who moved there (we've visited once before), and also visit the University of San Francisco and the San Francisco Circus Center, which is one mile from USF. This trip was all planned in the last couple of days, and she leaves tomorrow! I'm sure I would have spent a lot of my home time fussing about it, rather than hacking at work.
Anyway, it's been interesting, but I hope I manage to avoid it next year. Despite the proximity ("live at work" intsead of "work at home") I feel underslept. I brought my bicycle in order to try to get exercie, but mostly only managed 20 minute rides (one day it rained, so I ran on the hotel's elliptical instead). So I also feel somewhat under-exercised.
I hope to take Friday off; I think we're entitled (considering we started all this on Sunday morning!)
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Date: 2019-06-13 02:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-14 03:21 am (UTC)