Chaoscraft: join your girlfriend in Hackathon show -- Interview with the skate team

According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs , When the basic physiological and safety needs are met , People need to meet the needs of a higher spiritual level .

—— Zhou Zhiqiang , Captain slippery ,PingCAP Chaos Mesh Development Engineer

When TiDB The cluster appears in front of you as a flock of lambs , Still bleating , Maybe even the most serious programmers will feel “ A higher level of spiritual comfort ”. So in the just concluded TiDB Hackathon 2021 In the competition , When the skate team is Minecraft Inside show Kubernetes Workload and chaos experiment , The scene was once very happy , It's like suddenly from 《 Today's story 》 Across to 《 Happy comedian 》.ChaosCraft Also in many serious 、 Hard core projects stand out , Won the infinite creativity award .

This year is the second time for the skate team , In the words of captain zhouzhiqiang , Is to perform unique skills with your girlfriend again , Last year's unique skill was TiDB cockpit , Everyone laughs that this project predicted the arrival of the metauniverse in advance . But last year's project didn't win a prize , Zhouzhiqiang said that winning the prize is not important , What matters is that what you do is recognized by others , Winning a prize is a way to be recognized , To bring joy to everyone is also . The whole process of chatting with zhouzhiqiang was very happy , Also hope you can feel in the article .

The origin of the team name

Picture from the Internet

My girlfriend and I are the kind of people who are more curtilage in two dimensions ,“ Slippery eggs ” The name comes from the theme song of Japanese fan opera "light tone girl" 《Fuwa Fuwa Time》 My empty ear name . As soon as you see the name, you will think that the protagonists in the play will do what they want to do in a very relaxed and comfortable way , This is also a state that I envy .

Why do you choose to do a project that seems useless ？

I think whatever it is , It must be fun , Will be done for a long time . I am a lively person in life , In the process of communicating with other software engineers , You will find that their work or thoughts are too heavy , Always want to do a lot of very cool but not so funny Things about . But I think there are many interesting things to do in life , and Hackathon And I didn't refuse to do it “ entertainment ” project , That's why I came here Hackacthon The idea of a whole life .

And it is easy to get feedback to bring people happiness , If you want to do a hard core project with improved performance , Maybe the judges need to think about the cost and manpower of the project , And how to make this project produce real results . But our project will not be implemented , So everyone can only be happy after watching it , Happiness will show on your face , It's very direct . I also hope that people who have similar ideas with me will not be afraid , Don't be scared ,TiDB Hackathon It's a very nice The opportunity of , People won't just because what you do is not serious judge you .

Where does the project come from ？

My undergraduate major is digital media technology , I also learned some game related knowledge in college , So for “ game ” It's kind . And for me ,“ game ” It can be used as a new art form , It is in sight and hearing , Even in the sense of touch, it can stimulate people's senses . Games could have been used to do more , But the current society mostly uses this art form or technology to make the overhead world , Or a game .

Last year's skate competition ：TiDB cockpit

For the first time last year Hackathon The inspiration comes from a blog of brother Menglong （https://disksing.com/hackathon-idea/）, Because I majored in college , So I naturally thought of using VR To do something that is difficult to do in reality . When I entered last year , Because other people's projects are more serious projects , I was also worried about whether I would be kicked out of the competition system because of my style , But everyone's feedback is quite positive , So this year we will continue to “ Bring joy to everyone ” The way to compete .

KubeInvaders Project presentation , Picture from the Internet

The inspiration for this year's competition is some chaos engineering related games , for instance KubeInvaders, Use the way of crashing an alien spacecraft to simulate killing Pod. This project KubeCon There is also a speech at , So engineers all over the world will pay attention to this kind of useless egg , But a very fun project .

Many great inventions also begin with ideas that seem useless , Do you think your project will have this potential ？

It's really useless in itself , But just like human beings in the era of typewriter, they can't imagine the scene of clicking on the web page with the mouse , Now when we click the web page with the mouse , It is also hard to imagine what the more advanced operation interaction mode will look like in the future .

I think the use of 3D To present data and interact , There must be great potential in the future , But such projects are expected to be slower . some time , A more comfortable way to interact must be from the browser , From mobile apps , Enter into AR Go in your glasses ; By then ,“ The game engine ” Which computer graphics techniques in the .

How easy 、 Participate joyfully Hackathon ？

Our project is in Minecraft In the operation Kubernetes Related workload ,Kubernetes I wrote it mainly ,Minecraft She wrote the correlation , For example, why does a sheep have a name on its head? These are mainly what she is playing with . The other is our main program GitHub Copilot, Help complete a lot of graphics code , Greatly reduced Coding Cost of .

The project is basically free range , Do exactly as you like , Do what you think , With a kind of happiness 、 Easy attitude to complete .

Q： What technical difficulties have you encountered during the competition ？ How to solve it ？

Zhou Zhiqiang ： The big problem is Minecraft Of Modding problem , because Minecraft There is no official module API, There's no documentation , You can only guess what to use when modifying API. Thank you again GitHub Copilot, Basically you get one function name, Then tell it what to do in human language , Can automatically complete the inside function The implementation of the , Very convenient .

Q： This time, Hackathon Time is limited , What are your regrets during the game ？ Is there anything interesting to share during team formation and competition ？

Zhou Zhiqiang ： There is no great regret . There are a lot of engineering problems in the project due to the rush , But this is normal , Any project will have . In addition, many people think of feature It has not been implemented very well . Let's say we have Minecraft Network crystal is used in to refer to workload , The light beam between network crystals represents the data transmission between network cards , However, the data volume is not reflected for the time being . Because I have been an operation and maintenance personnel before , For operation and maintenance , If there is a hot spot on the machine , Network traffic is a very important indicator , So if you can show the size of network traffic , It's very useful .

There are too many interesting things , For example, when the first sheep with a name on its head appears in front of you and bleats , Is very happy . I usually use it to create Pod The output of a command of , It can even correspond to a sheep in front of me , It's really fun . The other is to do presentation Of PPT When , It's also interesting , We finished almost the whole process with a smile .

Q： What was your experience of this competition ？

Zhou Zhiqiang ： The experience is not bad , But people are getting lazier and lazier , Next time I guess I want to participate purely online . I was, too remote Work , Used to the development environment and network environment at home , I really don't want to record in advance demo video , Because I think there are too many possibilities of cheating , So the car overturned during the preliminaries . May be PPT Moved everyone , Just let me have the opportunity to enter the second round of exhibition .

Prospect and expectation

Q： Your project won the infinite creativity award this time , What are the prospects and expectations for the future of this project ？

Zhou Zhiqiang ： I hope it can be maintained , I also hope that interested students can help me . There is also a little regret here , Everyone is happy , But some people are so excited that they want to come and maintain it .

Project address ：https://github.com/fantastic-things/chaoscraft

Q： Looking forward to next year's TiDB**Hackathon** What are the improvements ？

Zhou Zhiqiang ： I hope there are more whole living people to show their unique skills , We can find more teammates next year , Because last year and this year it was my girlfriend and I 2 Do it by yourself , If there were more people , We might do better . Of course, if you have any good ideas , Welcome to me, too , I am very happy to talk about this with you .