ChaosCraft: Come to Hackathon with your girlfriend to perform unique skills丨Slippery Egg Team Interview

According to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs theory, after basic physical and safety needs have been met, people need to meet higher-level spiritual needs.

——Zhou Zhiqiang, Captain of Slippery Egg, PingCAP Chaos Mesh Development Engineer

When the TiDB cluster appears in front of you in the image of a group of lambs and bleats, no matter how serious programmers may feel, they will feel "a higher level of spiritual comfort". So in the just-concluded TiDB Hackathon 2021, when the Slippery Egg team demonstrated Kubernetes workloads and conducted chaos experiments in Minecraft, the scene was very happy, as if it suddenly crossed from "Today's Talk" to "Joyful Comedian" . ChaosCraft also stood out among many serious, hardcore projects, winning the Unlimited Creativity Award.

This year is the second time for the Skadan team to participate in the competition. In the words of the captain Zhou Zhiqiang, it is once again to bring his girlfriend to perform a unique skill. Last year's unique skill was the TiDB cockpit. Everyone laughed and said that this project predicted the arrival of the Metaverse in advance. But last year's project did not win an award. Zhou Zhiqiang said that winning an award is not important. What matters is that what you do is recognized by others. Winning an award is a way to be recognized, and it is also a way to bring joy to everyone. The whole process of chatting with Zhou Zhiqiang was very joyful, and I hope you can feel it in the article.

origin of the team name

Pictures from the Internet

My girlfriend and I are the kind of people who are more nerdy in the second dimension. The name "Slippery Egg" comes from the empty name of the theme song "Fuwa Fuwa Time", the theme song of the Japanese drama light-tone girl. Because as soon as I see this name, I think of the protagonists in the play doing what they want to do in a very relaxed and comfortable way, which is also a state that I envy.

Why choose to do a project that seems useless?

I think no matter what it is, it has to be interesting to do it for a long time. I am a relatively lively person in life. In the process of communicating with other software engineers, I will find that their work or thinking is too heavy, and they always want to do a lot of cool but not so funny things. But I think there are still many fun things to do in life, and Hackathon has not refused to say that it can't do "entertainment" projects, so I have the idea of coming to Hackacthon for a whole life.

And bringing people happiness is a relatively easy thing to get feedback on. If you want to do a hard-core project with improved performance, the judges may need to think about the cost and manpower of the project, and how to make the project produce real results. However, our project will not be implemented, so when everyone sees it, there is only happiness, and happiness will be displayed on the face, which is very direct. I also hope that people who have similar thoughts with me don't be afraid, don't be afraid, TiDB Hackathon is a very nice opportunity, and everyone will not judge you because what you do is not serious.

Where did the inspiration for the project come from?

My undergraduate major is digital media technology, and I have also learned some game-related knowledge in college, so I am relatively friendly to "games". And for me, "games" can be used as a new art form, which can stimulate the human senses visually, auditory, and even tactilely. Games could have been used to do more things, but most of the current society uses this art form or technology to make overhead worlds, or games.

Slippery Egg's entry last year: TiDB cockpit

The inspiration for participating in the Hackathon for the first time last year came from a blog by Meng Longge ( https://disksing.com/hackathon-idea/ ), because of my university major, I naturally thought of using VR to Do things that are hard to do in reality. When I participated in the competition last year, because other people's projects were more serious projects, I was worried that I would be kicked out of the competition system because of inappropriate styles, but everyone's feedback was relatively positive, so this year, I will continue to use "" Bringing joy to everyone” way to participate in the competition.

KubeInvaders project display, pictures from the Internet

The inspiration for this year's competition is some chaos engineering-related games, such as KubeInvaders, which simulate killing Pods by shooting down alien spaceships. This project also had a talk at KubeCon, so engineers all over the world would pay attention to this kind of useless, but very fun project.

A lot of great inventions start with seemingly useless ideas. Do you think your project has the potential?

It is really useless by itself, but just like humans in the era of typewriters could not imagine the scene where you can click on the web page with the mouse, when we use the mouse to click on the web page, it is difficult to imagine the more advanced operation and interaction in the future. what is it like.

I think the use of 3D to display data and interact will definitely have great potential in the future, but this type of project is expected to be slower. In the future, a more comfortable way of interaction will definitely be from the browser, from the mobile application, to the AR glasses; then, which computer graphics technologies in the "game engine" will shine.

How to participate in Hackathon easily and joyfully?

Our project is to operate Kubernetes-related workloads in Minecraft. Kubernetes-related work is mainly written by me, Minecraft-related is written by her, such as why there is a name on the sheep's head These are mainly played by her. The other is our main process GitHub Copilot, which helps to complete a lot of graphics code, which greatly reduces the cost of Coding.

The promotion of the project is basically free-range, and it is completely done according to interest, and it is done with a happy and relaxed attitude.

Q: What major technical difficulties did you encounter during the competition? How was it resolved?

Zhou Zhiqiang: The is the Modding problem of Minecraft, because Minecraft has no official modding API and no documentation, so you can only guess which API to use when modifying. Thanks again to GitHub Copilot, basically you give a function name, and then tell it what to do in human language, you can automatically complete the implementation of the function inside, which is very convenient.

Q: This time the Hackathon a limited time. What regrets do you have during the competition? Do you have any interesting things to share during the team formation and competition process?

Zhou Zhiqiang: does not have much regret. It is true that there are many engineering problems on projects due to rush, but this is normal, and any project will have it. In addition, many of the features that were thought of have not been implemented very well. For example, we use network crystals to refer to workloads in Minecraft. The beams between network crystals represent data transmission between network cards, but the amount of data is not reflected for the time being. Because I have worked as 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 it is very useful to show the size of network traffic.

There are too many interesting things, such as when the first sheep with a name on its head appears in front of you and bleats, it is very happy. The output of a command I usually use to create a Pod can actually correspond to a sheep in front of me, which is really fun. In addition, it was more interesting to do the PPT of the presentation. We almost finished it with a smile.

Q: How was your experience with this competition?

Zhou Zhiqiang: The is not bad, but people are getting lazy. Next time, I guess I want to participate purely online. I was also working in remote, and I was used to the development environment and network environment at home. I really didn't want to record demo videos in advance, because I felt that there were too many possibilities for cheating, so I overturned during the preliminaries. Maybe it was the PPT that moved everyone and gave me the opportunity to enter the second round of presentations.

Outlook and expectations

Q: Your project won the Infinite Creativity Award this time. What are your expectations and expectations for the future of this project?

Zhou Zhiqiang: hopes to continue to maintain it, and hope that interested students will help. There is also a little regret here, everyone is happy, but no one is so excited that they want to come and maintain it together.

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

Q: looking forward to next year's TiDB Hackathon What improvements have? **

Zhou Zhiqiang: expects more people to show off their unique skills. When I do it next year, I can find more teammates, because last year and this year, my girlfriend and I did it. If there are more people, We might do a little better. Of course, if you have any good ideas, you are also welcome to come to me, I am very happy to talk about this matter with you.