Build Something Awesome… but what?

"Build Something Awesome with OpenStack and the Open Cloud" hackathon could have lived up to its name, if only someone knew what kindof awesome things one could build with OpenStack. Or could explain it to developers. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Maddy (left), our unofficial team lead and Python expert, and Anna. More pictures from the 2013 OpenStack Hackathon are in my photo gallery.

The September 14th, 2013 OpenStack hackathon was the first hackathon I ever attended. It was organized and sponsored by Rackspace, creator of the OpenStack project. I didn't know much about it, so I assumed that it was just yet another API that lets you build applications. The hackathon event page did not hint at what kinds of applications you could build with it. So I was surprised when it turned out that for the kind of application my team wanted to build, OpenStack kind of… got in the way.

The hackathon started with a 2-hour presentation by Rackspace's developer advocate. He guided us through a tutorial on how to create a DevStack server on Rackspace. DevStack, by the way, he said, is not the same as OpenStack, but the distinction was lost on me. This was by far not the most subtle point that was lost on me.

Left to right: Paige, Jess, Maddy (our unofficial team lead and Python expert), and Christine. More pictures from the 2013 OpenStack Hackathon are in my photo gallery.

After the presentation our team of five, all female developers, rolled up our sleeves to start building the application proposed by one of our members. I investigated the server created during the walkthrough, looking for the directory where Apache keeps HTML files and web scripts. That's where I thought I would place a web application (at the beginning, just a Python script) that we were writing. I saw there was an index.html in the /var/www directory, but its contents were not the one that were displayed when you pointed your browser to this server's root URL. So I went to the presenter and asked why that was. He said, better don't try to use Apache on that devstack server; it's configured in a special way, and if you want to run an ordinary Apache web server, you'd be fighting it all the way. You should create a basic Linux server on Rackspace, not a Devstack server, and install Apache on it. I tried asking him what could we do with this Devstack server, if not write web applications. He said it was mostly for learning. Learning OpenStack. Well, that still didn't answer my question what I could do with OpenStack, but oh well, maybe I should have found out beforehand? It's not like it was any secret that this hackathon was for building things with OpenStack: it was in the name of the hackathon. But I wasn't the only person who went there with assumptions that I could build web applications with it.

Other lessons from this hackathon were more interesting, and came from my attempt to find out what can be accomplished during a hackathon. More about it in the next blog post.