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I always thought it would be fun to host a Rube Goldberg competition for systems engineering. Whoever could accomplish a simple task with the most ridiculous sy

I always thought it would be fun to host a Rube Goldberg competition for systems engineering. Whoever could accomplish a simple task with the most ridiculous system would win. Something like: read the 54th line of this file hosted at xx address. Then a submission could look like: 1. FTP a file to a server with the address. 2. the server reads the file and spins up a VM. 3. The VM polls an endpoint to download code to pull the address. 4. The code downloads the file and splits it into a single file per line. 5. A script loads all the files into an array and accesses array[53] to get the answer. ...you get the idea

Nextgrid 3y ago
> Whoever could accomplish a simple task with the most ridiculous system would win. See also: * Microservices * "Web scale" * Kubernetes * Cloud computing
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Use Nix to install Conda to install NVM to install Node to install …
myself248 3y ago
I used to host a competition called Anything But Ethernet. (You could use ethernet hops, they just didn't score points, so say you had some ethernet-to-whatever bridge, only the 'whatever' segment would count.) Over the years, we saw physical proof that a T1 circuit would in fact run over barbed wire, we had a human-in-the-loop following a DDR-esque stream of arrows to stomp on a pad that encoded data from one hop to the next, we had a writable RFID tag stuck to the front bumper of an R/C car that would drive back and forth between readers...
- d0gsg0w00f 3y ago
  That's awesome. Was this part of a company? University? I've brought the idea up to coworkers but nobody wants to waste extra cycles for something this dumb.
  - myself248 3y ago
    It was for a conference. Notacon was a hack-tech-art-music-demoscene conference in Cleveland, Ohio that ran from 2003 to 2014. I knew some of the organizers and got heavily involved in volunteering and setup for the event. The drive from my home north of Detroit to Cleveland is a couple hours, so I carpooled with another Michigander making the trip, a guy who ran large parts of the campus network at MSU. I was in telecom, mostly slinging SONET networks at the time, he was mostly Ethernet, but adjacent to a lot of other technologies. We spoke just enough of each other's language to have a lot to learn from each other. One year (I think it was 2005) in the car, we got to talking about transport networks, and lamenting the fact that "traceroute hides all the fun stuff"; it only shows IP-aware hops that decrement the TTL, and there could be thousands of miles of glass and hundreds of pieces of equipment, which considered the IP traffic to be "payload" and thus would never dare to alter it, between two hops that show up in a traceroute. (Plenty of otherwise-bright LAN engineers might naïvely assume that a packet leaves their router in Chicago and just arrives at another router in Denver because there was just a long, long piece of glass between them -- I think a lot of people have inflated ideas of fiber's capabilities because they're ignorant of the dozens of payload-transparent transport nodes and repeaters handling their circuit between the hops they see.) "Wouldn't it be fun", we mused, "to somehow shine some light on all those other networks that aren't IP, aren't ethernet, aren't visible to the normal user?" And as the miles ticked by, Anything but Ethernet was born. We proposed it to Notacon's organizers, who gleefully encouraged us to take it and run with it. I'm not sure how it ended up being mostly my baby, but I ran around and found sponsors for prizes, spent the year needling potential contestants into actually building the crazy stuff they verbalized while couched in hypotheticals, and then emceed the chaos when the conference weekend and judging time came around. This was pre-hackerspace, when all our nerd energy for the year was focused on one or two insane weekends (many of us also attended Penguicon or Defcon). So, extra cycles were less likely to be otherwise spoken for, and a few folks were highly motivated by the contest's appreciation of perverse, obscure, flashy, and MacGuyvered hacks. My greatest regret looking back on the whole thing is that I didn't put more emphasis on recording and documenting the insanity. That wasn't valuable at the time -- it existed in and for a short-duration event -- but it would be amazing to look back on more of it now.

Nextgrid 3y ago

> Whoever could accomplish a simple task with the most ridiculous system would win. See also: * Microservices * "Web scale" * Kubernetes * Cloud computing

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
quickthrower2 3y ago
Use Nix to install Conda to install NVM to install Node to install …

myself248 3y ago

I used to host a competition called Anything But Ethernet. (You could use ethernet hops, they just didn't score points, so say you had some ethernet-to-whatever bridge, only the 'whatever' segment would count.) Over the years, we saw physical proof that a T1 circuit would in fact run over barbed wire, we had a human-in-the-loop following a DDR-esque stream of arrows to stomp on a pad that encoded data from one hop to the next, we had a writable RFID tag stuck to the front bumper of an R/C car that would drive back and forth between readers...

d0gsg0w00f 3y ago
That's awesome. Was this part of a company? University? I've brought the idea up to coworkers but nobody wants to waste extra cycles for something this dumb.
- myself248 3y ago
  It was for a conference. Notacon was a hack-tech-art-music-demoscene conference in Cleveland, Ohio that ran from 2003 to 2014. I knew some of the organizers and got heavily involved in volunteering and setup for the event. The drive from my home north of Detroit to Cleveland is a couple hours, so I carpooled with another Michigander making the trip, a guy who ran large parts of the campus network at MSU. I was in telecom, mostly slinging SONET networks at the time, he was mostly Ethernet, but adjacent to a lot of other technologies. We spoke just enough of each other's language to have a lot to learn from each other. One year (I think it was 2005) in the car, we got to talking about transport networks, and lamenting the fact that "traceroute hides all the fun stuff"; it only shows IP-aware hops that decrement the TTL, and there could be thousands of miles of glass and hundreds of pieces of equipment, which considered the IP traffic to be "payload" and thus would never dare to alter it, between two hops that show up in a traceroute. (Plenty of otherwise-bright LAN engineers might naïvely assume that a packet leaves their router in Chicago and just arrives at another router in Denver because there was just a long, long piece of glass between them -- I think a lot of people have inflated ideas of fiber's capabilities because they're ignorant of the dozens of payload-transparent transport nodes and repeaters handling their circuit between the hops they see.) "Wouldn't it be fun", we mused, "to somehow shine some light on all those other networks that aren't IP, aren't ethernet, aren't visible to the normal user?" And as the miles ticked by, Anything but Ethernet was born. We proposed it to Notacon's organizers, who gleefully encouraged us to take it and run with it. I'm not sure how it ended up being mostly my baby, but I ran around and found sponsors for prizes, spent the year needling potential contestants into actually building the crazy stuff they verbalized while couched in hypotheticals, and then emceed the chaos when the conference weekend and judging time came around. This was pre-hackerspace, when all our nerd energy for the year was focused on one or two insane weekends (many of us also attended Penguicon or Defcon). So, extra cycles were less likely to be otherwise spoken for, and a few folks were highly motivated by the contest's appreciation of perverse, obscure, flashy, and MacGuyvered hacks. My greatest regret looking back on the whole thing is that I didn't put more emphasis on recording and documenting the insanity. That wasn't valuable at the time -- it existed in and for a short-duration event -- but it would be amazing to look back on more of it now.