HackKRK Blog

Hackers and Painters

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:00:00 -0400

“Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I’ve known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.”

Paul Graham <link>

On Wednesday we’re taking this idea to a whole new level.

All hackers gathered at HackKRK that day will write programs that paint… Yes, paint - there you have it!

Many coders, many technologies -> one painting canvas.

Come and join us and let’s write programs that work together to paint a masterpiece!

When: Wednesday 24.04.2013 6PM

Where: Base Lab: Marii Skłodowskiej-Curie 5/6, 31-025 Kraków

Registration: Eventbrite

RSVP: Facebook

Geek Games HackKRK - Video

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 07:07:02 -0500

Recap #11

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 11:44:00 -0500

Well, we did it again …

We would like to thank everyone for attending. There was everything - great atmosphere, food, drink, music, but most of all … coding. 5.5 hours brought us thousands (seriously!) of lines of code, and most importantly contributed to 16 super productions :). Games that several years ago would collect crowds of older and younger in front of their computers with large CRT monitors. Thank you very much on behalf of our entire team for the fact that you took part in it as well, and that you so bravely fought with the tasks of the evening/

The competition was fierce.

Magia i Miecz, Nyan Rush, ReversedIcy Towers, Box, Base Runner, Bomberman, Car Shooter, Flowerskiller, HackKRK Monsters, Lemkrk, Survive Zombie, Snake, UGH, Zombie Kill, Tanks and a few others whose names have not been disclosed to the public.

There was no one common trend - most people went in completely different directions. And yes - we had the arcade, shooting, fighting and even elements of the strategy and economics games. As I wrote earlier - each went to a different track, but at the end of the day old, good multiplayer was a recipe for success.
Known to all, a little modified “snake” but in multiplayer mode, gained most recognition of the people gathered, and the prize for first place went into the hands of psycho.
Additional awards, and words of appreciation went to the authors of Car Shooter (apohllo) and Magia i Miecz (matma). The fate of the winners were not known until the last moments.

All in all, it’s great that we all got together, had fun and met new people.

Many thanks once again and see you next time. Stay tuned and wait for info.

—
Tomek Glen
@HackKRK Team

PS. We know that (similarly to one of the polish iconic movie) we have to work on a method of choosing the method of voting … but, well, you can not have everything at once :)

—————————————

I am very very sorry, but I forgot about one more thing …

during the last meeting we had also the opportunity to hear about the “Automated Testing with iOS Calabash” - prepared and perfectly delivered by @apogsasis

Thanks so much for the time and energy spent on the preparation of it

HackKRK #11 - Geek Game Contest

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 02:48:46 -0500

Have you ever played one of the hits of the olden days, like Rogue or Adom? Have you ever dreamed about creating one of your own? You’ll have that opportunity at the next HackKRK.

We will be holding a contest for the best game with ASCII-art graphics. You’ll get starter code with some simple rendering functions to make it extremely easy to jump straight into it. At the end of the night a popular vote will decide who takes home the prize.

We are very excited to see what you’ll come up with. A new roguelike? A top-down shooter? A puzzle game? Anything is possible…

You’ll need Ruby 1.9.3. If you already have rvm configured then just “rvm install 1.9.3”. Otherwise visit https://rvm.io/rvm/install/, follow the instructions for your system and prep your machine for the event. It should be easy even for non-Ruby developers to come up with interesting games!

Register and join us on Thursday 31st of January - 6pm at Future Simple office. Also, let others now you’re coming by joining the event on FB.

As always… drinks and delicious food are on us. See you there!

What went on @ HackKRK #10

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 18:02:00 -0500

Wow, this is what I call celebrating HackKrk #10! So many people and so many new faces around! It was amazing! :)

We took off @ 18:30 with @nedzynski giving a welcome speach just before @josevalim took take the stage with his enlightening talk about “Cuncurrency in Ruby”. The crowd was huge and when the talk was over and the jaws were picked up, it was time to start the party!

We were planing to help you make some new friends with “Speed Dating” - a great game about sharing your knowledge, but, supprisingly, it turned out not to be even necessary! :) Everybody was talking, laughing and hacking around! I guess the free beer helped a bit here ;P

At 8:30 we’ve had some great ligtning talks: @mrYapee shared a tip on debugging memory leaks in a Ruby with no hope left, @cypreess introduced us to the “django-getpaid” application - a multi-broker payment processor for Django, our very own @NataliaTerlecka & @achmes announced the creation of CocoaHeads Kraków - a group for local iOS enthusiasts and @apogsasis supprised everyone with his “Programming for digital artist” talk featuring “Firebase” and “Mozilla Popcorn” projects!

A quick meal to power up and things were just getting better and better! :) I don’t know about you but I’ve met so many new interesting people that evening! :) And laughed so hard! :D

Well, It turned out to be yet another special evening @HackKrk ;) Thanks for coming and don’t miss the next one - it’s coming very soon!!!

—

@arturglier

HackKRK Team

November HackKRK - Learning & Sharing

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 10:46:00 -0500

Hey everyone,

We’re excited to invite you to the November edition of HackKRK! This time we will focus on learning and sharing knowledge. In that spirit we have a few very nice attractions for you.

Jose Valim - returning from RuPy conference in Brno - will join us and give a presentation about concurrency in Ruby. Questions and discussions will definitely follow. Ruby developers out there - you won’t want to miss this.

In addition to that we’ll host Speed-Dating sessions for anyone wanting to share and learn interesting hacks, technologies and pro-tips from and with other fellow hackers… Our ‘true random’ generator will assign a fellow hacker to you and you’ll both have a few minutes each to share what you’re passionate about. It’s a great way to get a peek into other coders’ toolboxes and learn new tricks. We did that a few months back and it was a ton of fun!

We’ll also have a Lightning Talks session. One will be about the formation of the CocoaHeads Krakow group for local iOS enthusiasts. Would you like to join and do a presentation as well?

As always anyone is free to hack on anything they want. Some private and Open-Source projects will definitely get some developer love.

Register here and join us on Thursday 22nd of November - 6pm at Future Simple office. Also, let others now you’re coming by joining the event on FB.

Drinks and food are on us. See you there!

—

Piotrek Nedzynski (@nedzynski)

HackKRK Team

HackKRK #9 Recap

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 15:12:01 -0500

On Thursday the 20th of September we’ve hacked through another HackKRK event. It was all about Open Source once again. In just one, but very busy evening we’ve managed to code pretty amazing stuff. Most of hackers focused on improving social network project walleet. We worked on the web version, made an Android client app, iOS client version and even Windows Phone app.

On top of that we’ve also contributed to a few other Open Source projects such as:

Rubinius (on github: repo)
Hstore+PostgreSQL gem

We’ve all had lots of fun together, shared many new ideas and met plenty of new people, if you’ve missed the event join us next time, cause we won’t stop hacking! :-)

Pure Open Source hacking - HackKRK #9

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 04:16:05 -0400

So this time we’re taking it easy. No contests, competitions, workshops - just pure hacking.

We wanted to code some Open Source and on Thursday the 20th of September we’ll do just that. We have a few projects that need developer love and we shall give it them. Some of the projects we’ll be working on include:

FSPanes
Rubinius
Walleet and an Android app for it.

… and definietely a few more.

Come and join us for an uninterrupted evening of coding - in a great atmosphere and with great people around. Plain and simple - we want to move the world of Open Source software a tiny bit forward again. Whether you have a project you’d like to contribute to or join one that someone else will be working is totally up to you.

If you haven’t been to HackKRK before you should definitely check out what went on previously: http://www.facebook.com/hackkrk

Food and drinks are on us. Just bring your gear, a ton of enthusiasm and see you then :)

HackKRK #8 Puzzle contest - recap

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 11:38:00 -0400

Another awesome HackKRK is behind us. The competition at the puzzle contest has been fierce with over 60 hackers in attendance. The most succesful puzzle solvers (1st place - cypreess, 2nd place - adiki, 3rd place - tomekowal) went away with prizes taking the form of an RC helicopter, a nerf gun and prowerball. The others will enjoy eternal glory.

Also in what is slowly becoming a traditional turn of events we held a lightning talk session together with WebMuses. We heard a couple inspirational talks from @theanxy, @KamilaSidor and Ewa Sobula while our very own @neaf presented his approach to frontend testing with node.js (you can look at the code for that one here).

Thank you all for making HackKRK great, and I leave you with a video account of the event.

@mrYapee

HackKRK #8 Puzzles strike back + Windows Phone workshop

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 06:56:40 -0400

Due to popular demand we have decided to hold another one of those awesome puzzle contests at the next meetup. If you missed the last one take a look at this video of what went on there:

As a side-track the good master @raawman has agreed to organise a not-so-gentle introduction to Windows Phone programming. We have a number of Nokia Lumia devices prepared for you to play with and the task will surely be interesting if I know the guy.

If you’d like to share a cool idea or tell us about what you have been working on sign up for the Lightning Talk session by emailing us at hackkrk@futuresimple.com.

@mrYapee

Robots and Monkeys @ HackKRK #7

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 10:59:06 -0400

The 7th HackKRK get-together was all about the AI Tournament and the DevOps challenge.

For the purpose of the AI Tournament we’ve set up a small web application to enable everyone to write their robots in RoboTalk, test them against some ferocious example bots, and finally to send their code into battle.

This approach allowed everyone to focus on designing their robots without much hassle with the setup of the environment. (Some people wrote their robots on phones or tablets).

The official tournament was launched at 9 p.m. By that time most people had prototype robots ready. Each battle had four robot participants and the fighting itself was being watched by the enthusiastically cheering crowd.

There were many approaches to write a winning robot. Some people teamed up to write one program and improve it as the time progressed e.g. Bartek (@bartekfi) and Jarek (@CvX) working on the Alternatoria robot (5th place) or Marcin (@sickill) and Michał (@sparrovv_) working on the Detrimentalist (30th).

There were pacifists like Antek’s (@antekpiechnik) HAL3000 (25th place) focused on not dying, as well as there were more offensive robots like Maria’s (@mmskrzyp) Marchew (23th) designed to inflict maximum damage.

We made sure all robots fought in a similar number of matches, so that newcomers would have equal chances of winning.

batalia65, designed by Natalia won the Tournament with 24 wins out of 47 matches. The second place was awarded to Złoo by Hetman. MyExGirl by Adun91 came in third.

Meanwhile some people were fighting with a pesky chaos monkey to complete the DevOps challenge. The goal of the challenge was to keep a service composed of a few AWS instances (a load balancer, a DB server and an app server) alive while the chaos monkey script disabled the services at given time slots.

The participants managed to successfully keep the service running by preparing for the strikes of the chaos monkey. The challenge was won by Grzegorz Nosek and Tomasz Pajor (@tomaszpajor).

Congratulations to all prize winners and participants. We hope you had lots of fun, and hope to see you next time!

AI tournament and DevOps challenge- HackKRK #7

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 09:42:00 -0400

After Euro 2012 we’re still in a bit of a competitive mood… so we decided to organize a tournament at the next HackKRK - already next Thursday 12th of July at Future Simple Lab!

You will compete against other hackers using Artificial Intelligence driven robots. With a game platform provided all you’ll need to do is submit your program that defeats opponents. Unfortunately their aim is to defeat you!

Your robots will be controlled using a simple set of defined robot instructions which makes this tournament technology-agnostic! No matter whether your day-to-day programming language is C#, Java or Ruby — you can still come and compete against other hackers. The simplest robots can be just a few lines of code long… Plus, we’ll do live coverage of the robot battles on the screen :) This is going to ROCK!

High Availability challenge is another super exciting thing we are organizing this month. Sys-admins & DevOps will have a great chance to face simulated cloud services outage - very similar to one that happened recently to AWS. Main challenge will be to keep all services running (thanks to good design & automation) during the fake power failure.

If that’s not enough you can still come by and code Open Source or share your Innovative World-Changing Idea™ during a session of Lightning Talks - it’s a great way to let people know about your projects and test your communication skills.

So mark the date in your calendar now and register for the best hacker event in Krakow and help us share it on Facebook. As usual, we start at 6pm - great food, Red-Bulls and beer are included.

See you July 12th at Future Simple Lab - Marii Skłodowskiej-Curie 5/4 (map).

Btw. if you haven’t seen the video from last HackKRK, you definitely should. It’s awesome!

HACKKRK #6 - WHAT A CROWD!

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 16:08:00 -0400

With over 60 people in attendance the sixth HackKRK was the biggest to date. Big thanks to all participants for making it such a great event!

The main track this time involved building a mobile frontend on various platforms for an image-guessing game. A number of attempts have been made, you can find some of them on github:

Android:

https://github.com/chalup/HackKrk-Guess

https://github.com/bartoszfilipowicz/GuessGame (by @bartekfi and al.)

https://github.com/partition/hackkrk-guess-android (by @mherych)

iOS:

https://github.com/lubiluk/hackkrk-guess-client (by @nataliaterlecka, @greggscutum and @iMientus)

Windows Phone:

https://github.com/rawman/HackkrkGuessWP7 (by @raawman)

The nodejitsu crew has also made an appearance and were hacking on a wireframing app, which you can check out here:

https://github.com/asyncly/wires

Last but not least we had a hardware project by @michalbugno, @mrYapee and others to build an arduino-driven quadcopter - they are still a ways off but an engine test drew some attention from the crowd.

During a longer intermission a joint session of lightning talks was held with Webmuses where @_bejo and @izydor86 shared their thoughts on Apple WWDC, @michalbugno and @oinopion introduced their input sanitizer (https://github.com/futuresimple/input_sanitizer), @EmiliaMaj explained how a bad designer is a good one in fact, @mehowte showed how to make web development less painful and @kgonciarz revealed the secrets of gamification.

See you next time for some more hacking!

Pawel Obrok, @mrYapee

Mobile HackKRK + Open Source

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 05:44:00 -0400

Casual games have taken over. We’ve all played them (on the bus, in the waiting line, on the stoplight :) and we thought that it would be cool to create one.

So on Thursday June 21st mobile devs are joining forces on HackKRK #6 to build a casual game for multiple platforms - iOS, Android and WP7.

The idea is simple - to combine the addictiveness of guessing puzzles (i.e. Logos Quiz Game) with the social aspect of multiplayer games. The plan is to create a game where you’ll be able to create photo puzzles and keep answering riddles created by others to get the highest score. It’s going to be a ton of fun!

But wait! There’s more… In the hackery spirit of freedom we’ll have a second track of contributing to Open Source projects. We did it last month - it was great and we’re keeping the promise to continue doing it. See how fun it was here.

So mark the date in your calendar now, register for the best hacker event in Krakow and spread the word about it on Facebook. As usual, we start at 6pm - great food, Red-Bulls and beer are included.

See you June 21st at Future Simple Lab - Marii Skłodowskiej-Curie 5/4 (map).

Open Source Night - HackKRK #5 recap

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 04:04:21 -0400

HackKRK no. 5 is behind us. On May 17th about 50 hackers gathered together in one office to collectively improve the world - little by little, piece by piece, commit by commit. We’ve improved Rubinius, FSVerticalTabBarController, Walleet, Django Happy URLs and a few other Open Source projects.

It felt great and we’ll definitely be doing this more often… but enough words - see for yourself:

Music: “Strike The Root (Original House Project Mix) 2012” by Official_Nc_Fx
http://ccmixter.org/files/Official_Nc_Fx/36663

Stay tuned for the news about next HackKRK - the best hacker event in Krakow!

HACKKRK #5 - NIGHT OF OPEN SOURCE

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:25:00 -0400

Recent HackKRKs all centered around knowledge sharing and competition. It’s time we put these newly acquired tricks and energy into giving back to the community. On Thursday May 17th we’re coming back with the night of Open Source hacking.
Let’s get together to build, fix and test software we all use everyday. Everyone of us uses a lot of Free Software after all.

Some of the already suggested projects include:

Obj-C: AFNetworking, FSVerticalTabBarController
C#: SignalIR, machine.specification
Java/Android: ActionBarSherlock
Ruby/C++: Rubinius, minitest
Python: legit, django

There will be more and everyone is more than welcome to work on anything they like. It’s free - register for the event here and help us spread the word about the best hacker event in Krakow!

See you May 17th at Future Simple Lab - Marii Skłodowskiej-Curie 5/4. We will provide great food, beer and Red-Bulls!

Make sure to visit us at http://www.hackkrk.com, on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at @hackkrk.

HACKKRK #4 - Intro Video

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 07:12:00 -0400

HackKRK #4 introduction video. Stay tuned for the full thing…

Music: “Bustin Out” by Benjamin Orth
http://ccmixter.org/files/Benjamin_Orth/31024

HACKKRK #4 - SUPER SOCIAL NIGHT

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 09:23:00 -0400

And so the 4th installation of HackKRK is now behind us. We’ve had loads of fun and the whole place was buzzing with ideas and knowledge being exchanged freely.

At 6pm @kiszal introduced everybody to the 2 activity tracks people could choose from: Speed Dating and Code Retreat - it all went off from there.

Anyone who wanted to exchange ideas with other hackers could just log into a web app (big ups to @antekpiechnik & @kiszal for hacking it together) and be randomly paired up with another person currently waiting for a discussion partner. People got into it very quickly… Just within the first hour 17 pairs assembled.

Discussion topics were all over the map: @wo3kie was describing and showing off assembler with flair and ‘happy spark in his eyes’ :). @yundt87 was showing off Meteor - pure JavaScript web framework. Other topics ranged from isolation in databases by @asendecka, testing framework for groovy - Spock by @piotrmachner, virtual memory by @oinopion and many more.
By far the most popular were programming setups - i.e. tmux, Vim macros, fizzy by @evilchelu. We even had a triangle - @sebcioz, @jakubmal and @phockee were ‘taking it easy’ and installing yesod - a web framework for Haskell.
Altogether we’ve had 46 random pairs assigned and many more discussions when people just talked freely in hallways.

The other track at HackKRK was no less interesting. Ruby, Python and C# were represented by 5 pairs which teamed up to do Code Retreat exercises led by @powczarek. They all went through three 1h long sessions of designing and implementing Game of Life - always starting from scratch and in different teams - improving the solution every time.

Around 9:30pm we had a session of Lightning Talks where @marcinbunsch talked about test coverage with JSCoverage and @michalbugno explained how to get eternal e-fame by contributing to Rubinius. Lastly @sickill blew all of us away with his ascii.io command line recording. Check out this screencast: Star Wars: Episode IV - you absolutely need to see this!

Right after Lightning Talks @phockee took the stage and led an exercise in guesstimation. Check out the questions and correct answers - 3 teams took first place (@yundt87 with @nedzynski, @antekpiechnik with @michalbugno, @hfrntt with @burnhype). Congrats to the winners and big thanks to Przemek for organizing the exercise and tirelessly counting votes :)

All in all it was an amazing event - it turned out to be a great way to meet new people, to exchange ideas and hacker tips & tricks. See you all next month - May 11th.
Follow us @hackkrk and on facebook to get updates.
——
Piotrek (@nedzynski)

HackKRK Team

———— Update ————

See the pictures and video from the event.

HackKRK #4 Second track - mini Code Retreat

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 06:59:00 -0400

They say that ‘less is more’ but in case of HackKRK it’s not that simple. As you know main topic is Speed Dating but we wanted to give our hackers more freedom to choose and added a second track. HackKRK #4 will feature a mini CodeRetreat session! CodeRetreat is a programming exercise in TDD and Pair Programming. It was started by Corey Haines and here’s how it works:

You pair with another dev (we’ll help you find one) and for 45 minutes you code a simple but not trivial problem, Game of Life. We will start with 2-3 sessions and see what happens. Then we evaluate what was good, what could be better and put some constraints to have more fun. Have you tried writing code without an ‘if’ statements? Or never write a method longer than 1 line? How about not speaking to person you’re Pair Programming with? Certainly you can switch tracks back and forth! This and more waits for you at HackKRK #4. You can read more about how it works at http://coderetreat.com/

PS. If you want to take part in CodeRetreat, make sure you have your development environment with test framework ready to rock!

Przemek Owczarek(@powczarek),
HackKRK team

HackKRK #3 - full video

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 04:48:44 -0400

Full video from HackKRK #3. Enjoy!

BTW If you would like to join next HackKRK event held on the 12th of April, signup here

Song: “Awel” by stefsax
http://ccmixter.org/files/stefsax/7785

Song: “Pulse (George Ellinas remix)” by George Ellinas
http://ccmixter.org/files/George_Ellinas/14073