A free, fully-remote hackday that happens on the last Saturday of every month. It's very informal and emphasises chill-hacks-ing over actually producing anything that fully works (though if you wanna aim for that, that's cool too!)
An old school banger, this was more a love-letter to hacks gone by, but with some tasty tea being spilled about like a billion different topics. Though light on participants, the discussion was far-ranging, and we hacked up our convos into amazing revelations, and ebullient tomfoolery. Hashtag emdash. Things people did Gabor was the MVP of this hackday, explaining quite a bit to us. It would be…
This had lots of links, and even better thinks…rhymes so hard I’m bout to call the papparrazi on myself! Things people did: Panda continued the amazing journey into NER and coreference resolution, and graced us with https://youraislopbores.me/, which was fun. He also refactored existing code and added tests for the step after the NER, the resolution and normalisation (which is doing things like…
A bit of a renewal, the hackday is still going strong, and faces old were new again! Things people did Gabor is back! He’s now vibe coding like a baws and is stronger than Darth Vader could possibly imagine. Panda did some research into Qualitative Content Analysis for an advocacy project. Adam continued working on the distributed tracing lab, and even though it’s nowhere near done, he’s hoping it…
This one was a quiet winter missive, a remembrance of times past and code shared…but also code deleted, the best kind of PRs… Things people did Ben was motohacking, and just camping via motorcycle like errday his birfday. Jake continued work on the remotehack livemap, but we still haven’t worked out where to run the backend slash who’s gonna pay for it, slash product management shizz…so it remains…
This was mostly written up by Ben, which was very much appreciated, since Adam doesn’t have Claude hooked up the remotehack discord yet. Things people did Adam - planned to write up a bazillion prs for our passed hackdays, showed us moltbook , livestreamed with some inside-out hats while reppin’ containers 📦, then used claude code to fix some slow-jams issues on the go. Ben - built a…
This was a super quiet one, as is tradition, so Adam is just going to rant about integrations with payment providers. While vibe coding a side project and just seeing how it would be to integrate with a service like stripe/gumroad/creem, he chose creem and tried to get the preview environment working. But of course the names of the events sent from the creem webhooks don’t at all match what they…
This was lots of publishing and lots of breaking stuff…but that’s very welcome, otherwise we would be hacka-lackin! Things People Did Jacob worked with a books API, which is some tasty bread-and-butter stuff. Ben completely broke the remotehack site by making the classic error of thinking that cloudflare’s DNS is as easy of a UX as the rest of their products, like, seriously, how is it so…
Since this is now the record for “most after the fact hackday writeup I’ve ever done”, I may or may not take some liberties… Things people did Jacob got a job doing software…BIG SUCCESS!!! Adam finally got the k3s-remotelab up and running…now to make it shiny!
Since this was another writeup I was mega-behind on, I’ll just share a joke: Q: Why was the Council of Elrond so reliable? A: They had Elven nines. Things People Did Adam was able to set up a very simple website for his new company that does absolutely nothing, but has a royal flush of green 100’s on lighthouse (since it’s literally just html with inline js/css)…it’s also his writeup, so even…
This officially marks the most writeups I’ve been behind on, so it’s nice to celebrate that in these docs that probably nobody reads. Anyway, this was a nice mid-Summer hack, and there was actual hacking, so I declare it a success! Things people did Jacob was around for a spot of speedrunning learning Java and concurrency for a pair-programming assessment in a job application. Ben took over Ryan’s…
A totally forgotten hackday writeup, so let’s just freestyle it! Things people did Ben was generating gaussian splats of a mountain bike trail that he rode. Adam pulled double hackday duty, attending both the remotehack and the Dundee Makers Gonna Make hackday. Once physically on-site in downtown Dundee he tried to register a company for like 2 hours via company house, and then gave up, since the…
The hackday was all about going back to Bassics, which is the best bass guitar joke Adam could come up with. The best bass guitar jokes that the LLM’s came up with were so embarrassingly not even jokes that I won’t repeat them here. …Ryan now has a bass guitar is what I’m saying. Things people did Ryan got a bass guitar, as mentioned, and discussed his approaches to practising it, which were very…
The Summer Hack of our Discontent… This one was very quiet, and the majority of the chat in the discord was about what people weren’t going to do. Things people did Ryan was busy indulgin in his babyccino, so he was out for the day. Ben continued hacking on the https://stacks.camera/ sideproject, but didn’t drop any updates on how it went…tsk tsk. Pete did a bunch of physical hacks, which…
So I decided to try out some AI summaries, and these are the various ones that got spit out from a couple different models… Stuff people did - according to Gemini (including an imaginary baby for Panda) Adam started the hack day by reading through a study of ORM performance bugs. His primary task was to write up the March hackday summary, which he completed and published. He later got sidetracked…
Very remote, and very hack. Things people did Ryan put a gutter on his shed, and then got some bluetooth direct-to-swift app wired up, easily the most productive of all of us Adam started trying to work out how to record a screen and mic audio on linux (read: OBS still too ornery to set up successfully), but then got sidetracked by the mobile view UI of the Nuxt i18n page being crap, so spent time…
A very quiet one, which is fair enough after we came out storming into 2025 last month. Some skiing, some accidents, but thankfully no ski accidents. Stuff people did Ryan and Ben were off on a ski holiday, starting off right posting a pic from the airplane…then Adam asked for more pics and Ryan said yes, but didn’t upload any more pics. :trumpet: :trumpet:… Adam cut his right middle finger while…
The first hack of the year, and we had a new joiner, plus some fun AI-centric chatz. Stuff people did Max opened up a WHOLE can of worms by suggesting that Adam should check out deepseek on LM Studio, and that basically ended Adam’s hackday. He then advocated for a coffee product he was clearly receiving remuneration for, like so many Reverend Lovejoys. Ben continued work on doing viz stuff with…
This one was very quiet, as per usual. We still had one stalwart officially hacking, so this is the Ballad of Hughmas! Things Hugh Did Hugh wrote a software model of some hardware he’s planning. He also wrote one test for it. He furthermore was kind enough to post about that in the general channel so I could add it to this writeup.
Picking up steam at the end of the year, this was a very fast and furious hackday with new revelations, deployments, attention to cost optimisation, and even some Irish Gaelic! Needed way more ski suggestions, though! Things people did Adam got the hackday off to a sterling start, crafting a delicious prompt to get Claude to implement a feature in JQ Pilot that the only ever user asked for about a…
We had an old grizzled vet in attendance, a new young gun ready to make a mark, and then Adam thought about the rust borrow checker and blue his whole project trying to understand it. …that line started as a hilarious attempted wedding joke, but Adam just kept typing… Things people did Ben held the flame for the old-timer wily vets, opening PRs early and often, and confounding us with verbiage…
The kids are starting to rear their heads and roar with raring alacrity! At least half of the people who commented in discord on the day were childcaring, which is quite important, and maybe the most engaging form of remote hacking anyway? And when did Adam start writing question marks at the end of everything even when it’s not grammatically a question, but rather to convey discourse functions?…
A return to the late Summer dolldrums and cooler climes saw a more popular hackday with participants germinating all kinds of interesting ideas! Things people did Ben got off to a rousing start, showing us all the GitHub Copilot Workspace functionality, which is hashtag amazeballs. We created and reviewed a PR to update the frontend for the in-browser AI functionality for chrome canary, and it was…
This is traditionally the quietest Remotehack month, and there was chat of shed hacks, and family visit-induced Summer chaos. …also, Adam has still not used any of his G type EC2 spot instance quota…watch this space! Panda updated DNS records to fix certificate problems
THE 50TH REMOTEHACK!!!! The best part is that this writeup was done immediately prior to the 52nd Remotehack, because Adam was so awestruck by the grandness of everything the group had achieved, he totally forgot to write up what happened, so here’s a very short summary before he writes up the 51st Remotehack summary, which he also forgot to do until just now. We marvelled at AI engineer speak…
I have no idea how I missed that March this year was our 4 year anniversary, but I guess we can just compensate by having a phenomenal big bang blowout for the 50th remote hack in June. Things people did Adam Finally integrated SSO sign-on (HE SAID WHAT HE SAID) via the tooling at granted.dev to assume roles both in the console and direct opening of AWS accounts in a firefox tab. Amazeballs. Ben…
This one was all about the suspense and mystery of hackday disappearances. It’s also an open question as to whether we can make “saasafrass” happen as a term for completely fake saas businesses that are stood up in a week for the express purposes of demo-ing that somebody is running “production” services on EKS… But more to the point of the hackday milieu…twas getting sunnier, and the pull of nice…
After briefly considering dropping the free tier of the Remote Hackday and only offering premium subscriber options, it was decided to scupper the whole thing and just continue to lose massive amounts of money with this dubious enterprise. Things people did Ryan was scripting a backup of his iCloud Photos onto his Synology NAS now he’s replaced the failed disks with SSDs. Adam managed to miss the…
This was a very quiet hackday, and we didn’t even have anybody show up in the main room, though Adam had a second daughter show up the following day, so there was some great maternity ward hacking going on all Saturday.
Welcome to a new year and a new you! Well, a new hackday anyway. We had all kinds of pent up energy from skipping the one last month, that this was a veritable cambrian explosion of hacking energy. Things people did Piers led us off with a bang, discussing all the cool stuff with converting arduino to micropython, and then let us talk him into unboxing his birthday present early (sorry, Piers’s…
We skipped this one (like last year) due to holiday season.
Rolling into the winter season, this was a refreshing, mostly morning, hack. We did pack a whole lot into those early hours, though, and bread, as per usual, dominated the hackday. Things people did Ryan led the day off right with some tasty bread tales, and then proceeded to fix a lot of people’s hacks, reminiscent of an earlier-period Sound Guy. Oh yes, and he also showed off his OBS skills,…
While I regale you with tales of what everyone did, would you be interested in discussing a ski holiday? No? Well that’s alright, I’ll keep telling you anyway… Things people did Ryan showed up early and planned to do some guitar string hacking. It’s always nice to hear to soft dulcet tones of a well-tune guitar on the slopes, don’t you agree? After Ben showed up, they then proceeded to get an…
Our second attempt at adding the stuff people did directly in the discord, so hopefully Adam is able to correctly write it down this time. Things People did Ryan hacked on birthday/anniversary (which technically could be the same thing, cause they’re both annual) stuff offline, which is an excellent use of a remotehack! Adam was mostly unavailable, given the sway of the funfair mafia over his…
This was our most AI-centric hackday to date, mainly because we generated candidates for a new remotehack logo, and then proceeded to use exactly none of them. We also probably had more coffee (or at least mentions thereof) than any other hackday, so lemme just ask ChatGPT if those things are correlated. ChatGPT Coffee consumption is not directly correlated with using AI for tasks, although some…
Oh, those sweet summer duldrums…when half of us are following along lackadaisically with apparent evidence of UFOs, and the other half are trying to reproduce an experiment to basically revolutionise the flow of energy itself… ..but then we all went on holiday, lol. Things people did before/after/during said holiday Ryan hacked on, in his own words, “synchronous-feeling background jobs”, and also…
Although the sun did grace us mightily across the island, this was one of the better-attended hackdays in recent memory. I’m not saying that the allure of JQ-Pilot had 100% of the credit for this, but I’m also not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not saying it. Things people did Dan took apart some headphones, attempted some…
This was a bit of quiet one, which is just as well that nobody was around to witness Adam failing spectacularly at crafting trixy jq pipelines. Ryan was kind of around, but battling norovirus, so he and Adam chatted about not hackstuff for approx 20 minutes and didn’t record it. When WILL the next podcast episode be…????? …only time will tell Things people did Adam was trying to make a…
The April of our full content! We had a great time mostly chatting, but also flexing on projects that had no great demonstrable value, but phenomenal interest and payoff for all involved! Things people did Hugh started off the day in high spirits, and mused about updating a physical contraption to obey more physics laws, despite not knowing any himself. He later retretreated to the cold comfort of…
🥳🎂🎉🥳🎂🎉🥳🎂🎉🥳🎂🎉🥳🎂🎉🥳🎂🎉🥳🎂🎉 It’s been THREE YEARS since our first remote hack day. 🥳🎂🎉🥳🎂🎉🥳🎂🎉🥳🎂🎉🥳🎂🎉🥳🎂🎉🥳🎂🎉 Despite that, most of the day was spent trying to achieve a stable video call with the group. We spent a good amount of time chatting about custom keyboards, finding duplicate files (and Rust alternatives to things), seeding databases, and the ethics in…
It was chaos without our leaders: we met up at 9:30 and said what we’d do, people then hacked and chatted, and we demoed at 16:30. No podcasts were recorded. Things people did Piers blew up a microcontroller for his oil sensor and worked out that he had ground and power flipped (a big no-no) Dan built a standing desk, fixed his mics sound, and used a new data format to show the current and next…
Quite a romp to ring in the new year, and the first hack of 2023 was a full deck of wild cards and wacky characters! Things people did Dan fixed his dementia clock and hacked on a birdbox camera Ryan dropped the news that Cossimo is dead, long live boring espresso machine, and then he also ordered a bunch of meal options using Ruby Joe saved a hedgehog Pete found zero XSS vulnerabilities in his…
More RemoteChat than RemoteHack, which made it even more relaxed. Things people did Adam hacked his way into a MySQL container, and started exporting things to Prometheus, learning a lot along way. In a fit of productivity, he also cleaned his whole house and roasted a duck for Ducksgiving. Disappointingly this wasnt a celebration of the Mighty Ducks. Hugh showed us his new guitar. Panda tweaked…
The Halloween hack, which had a decidedly un-Halloween flavour…in fact, I don’t think we actually mentioned it once. On the other hand, we also set a new record for actual amount of hacking going on, since it’s STILL GOING ON RIGHT NOW AS I TYPE THIS UPDATE THREE DAYS LATER (see below)!!!!! Things people did Piers and Ethan were creating a very spooky pumpkin, involving a distance sensor to howl…
September hack: The hack that time forgot As promised, nobody who was actually there felt like submitting a writeup, so here’s a picture of my daughter explaining books to penguin statues.
This hackday saw great success on CI for the hack itself. We received no update on the previous hack, where Ryan may or may not have created a self-aware espresso machine that now controls his house. We had some non-tech hacks, which is totally cool. We also saw some chat on the demise of Heroku and how everybody now has to move the stuff they forgot they had to another platform. Things people did…
A proper Summer hackday! People dipped in, people dipped out, Ryan painted a room, and we promised to record podcasts and then didn’t. BUT that does set us up for some tasty mid-week SURPRISE podcasting sometime between now and the next hackday. Who knows what we might end up discussing?!?!? OH! And we actually had two people (Dan and Panda) actually FINISH SOMETHING! So it was notably one of our…
A very nice sunny day, and people showed up anyway. Things people did Joe started getting data from his smart meter, and turns out the Dutch energy company is sending him texts. Ben and Ryan did some obscure thing with XSLT, and nobody really knows why, but they had a smashing time doing it. I guess we’ll just have to listen to the podcast! Ruth got a new puppy, and was well busy with that. Adam…
An amazing and very full hackday! We returned to a full house, with 9 people joining! There were so many problems that we solved, our only problem was how to find more problems! Things people did Max fixed everyone’s problems, which was exceedingly helpful. Hugh joined us for the first time, and had an issue with NextJS images.. …and Max fixed it. …and then Hugh had another problem with…
This hackday featured lots of great book recommendations and van chat, all captured in the discord chat, as well as Lots of general non-technical chatter, a hallmark of a successful hackday. Things people Did Dan had some raspberry pi’s that did not have golang installed, and then he installed it. And then he reinstalled it! Piers unveiled the latest updates to the camper van, and discussed how it…
The 2 Year Anniversary!!! This was our 2-year anniversary remote hack, and it was a smashing success, by all accounts! All the usual drama was afoot, with makeshift non-alpine holidays, murder mysteries, palette clensers, and even a nailbiting match result against the Docker Dangermice (TL;DR - they won…again). Admittedly, at the inception of the Remote Hack, I think we expected it to grow to…