So I had the pleasure of attending the hackathon at VMworld and meeting @kmruddy and the mighty beard!
So I was asked to join up with Graham Barker @VirtualG_UK and David Taylor (WHO DOES NOT HAVE A TWITTER ACCOUNT)
David how can you be a guy that travels around the world for Dell EMC on projects and not even have a Twitter account, you should be ashamed of yourself!
They had an idea, that to me was super interesting. They were using VMware Workstation 15 with the new REST API bits, along with PowerCLI to create a quiz.
After discussing the idea with them, I came up with the idea of it being called Russian Roulette.
In VMware Workstation there was a basic vSphere setup:
- vCenter
- 3 ESXi Hosts
- A Test VM
The idea was that there would be a pool of questions based around the vSphere 6.x maxims and you would be scored on how quickly you could answer them, but you if you rushed and/or got it wrong, something would randomly die in the background environment!
If you got the question right and the VM stayed up:
If the VM went down, you had 90 seconds to see if vSphere HA would bring it back, and, if it did……you could continue:
If the VM never came back well………………..
Everything was randomised, so if you got the same question when you played again and got it wrong something totally different would die in the environment!
Now if you look at the requirements for the hackathon it had some clear and concise things that needed to be covered :
https://blogs.vmware.com/code/2018/10/23/vmworld-europe-hackathon-know-before-you-go/
- Creativity
- Usefulness
- Presentation/pitch
- Team collaboration
- Fun/learning
In my presentation, you will see I made sure I hit those points!
Now everyone takes it seriously, and you should …..but for me, the big goal was to have fun and to make it as fun as possible!
Let me ask you a question:
How well do you know the vSphere Maxims????!!! I can tell you now I don’t know them off the top of my head! That is what made it interesting.
There was nothing serious about what we were doing, you could use it as a learning exercise to see how well you knew the maxims and learn that there are consequences to taking risks!
The guys did some solid code and I provided the questions and did the testing and validation of everything to ensure it actually worked.
Everything you will see in the video, we essentially did on the day and on the fly! David was getting a bit stressed at times!
We came 2nd in the Best “day of” category! Which I have to say I am very pleased with! We won a Raspberry Pi 3 each and Kyle hooked us up with VMware Workstation 15 licenses too!
Team H4ck 4 C3nt3r presenting on a quiz based learning tool to play Russian roulette in your environment. Get a wrong answer, a "bug" is introduced. They used #PowerShell and sourced questions from the #vSphere maximums guide. Hilarious. #Hackathon #vmworld pic.twitter.com/dWG6hizWBE
— Kyle Ruddy (@kmruddy) November 5, 2018
Kyle has his beard………and I have my two hats ha!
Anyway enough of all that! Here is the video of the presentation and it in action!
I would like to thank everyone I met and to Graham and David for letting me join their team!
Bilal @Dark_KnightUK
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