The fourth RIPE NCC Hackathon was as fun and productive as the previous three, with even more supporting organisations and participants. This short article aims to express our gratitude to everyone involved and to give a summary of our experiences, while several projects will be described in more detail in the follow-up articles.
Traditional photo of a collection of laptops with stickers
During the weekend before the RIPE 73 Meeting in Madrid (22 - 23 October 2016), we held our fourth RIPE NCC organised hackathon.
This time, the topic was "Tools for IXPs", and operators from as many as eleven IXPs were involved (Ams-IX, De-CIX, ECIX, France-IX, INEX, MSK-IX, Namex, Netnod, NL-IX, SENIX and Top-IX) together with a number of supporting organisations (Euro-IX and PeeringDB) and sponsors (Comcast, ISOC and Facebook). Other participants included developers from various FLOSS projects, network operators and students and researchers from more than 15 countries across all five continents!
Hacking
As it is already a tradition, work was fuelled by stroopwafels, cooperation, brainstorming and finding new ways to solve old problems. Several challenges were shared on the mailing list during the preparation phase, with teams at the hackathon formed around the presented ideas for projects.
Atmosphere during introduction, work phase and closing party
Based on experience from previous hackathons, we kept certain logistical aspects that did work and improved on several things we got the feedback on last time:
- Less partying, more time to work: Saturday dinner was "on site" with traditional hackers' food (pizza!)
- Better coffee: we had a barista this time
- Organised transport to the venue of Sunday's dinner, and good beer at a craft brewery
- Facilitators at the venue helped make team-forming better this time around
- Investing time and effort in prior organisation payed off, and everything went smoothly
Brainstorm flipcharts
Results
The results of all this hard work were impressive!
- Seven teams contributed projects
- Several teams were given the opportunity to present their projects at RIPE 73 (see archive)
- Eleven new code releases were contributed to our GitHub community repository
Please find all the results summarised in the table below:
| Project | Code | Goal | Contributors |
Slides & Video |
Website/Demo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IXP Valuator | Code |
Visualising the value of the IXP (e.g. access to local content staying local) |
Sebastian Casto, James Reilly, Flavio Luciani, Khoudia Gueye, Guillermo Cicileo | ||
|
PeerMe (aka "Make Peering Great Again") |
Code | Tool to discover and generate possible peerings between Internet Autonomous Systems | Cooper Lees, James Paussa, Arnaud Fenioux | ||
|
Pinder (Tinder for Peering) (Peer Speed Dating) |
Code | Swipe Right On A New Peering Relationship | Andrea Beccaris, Daniel Quinn, David Barroso, Hannos Adollarsson, Matthew Walster |
Slides Video |
website |
| Universal Looking Glass |
frontend code backend code |
One Looking Glass to Rule Them All | Benedikt Rudolph, Mathias Handsche, Orlin Tenchev, Alexander Ilin, Mikhail Grishi |
Slides Video |
Demo |
| Bird's Eye |
PHP backend Frontend CLI Frontend Web Go API |
A Simple Secure Micro Service for Querying Bird | Barry O'Donovan, Daniel Karrenberg, Matthias Hannig, Michael Cardell Widerkrantz, Daniel Melani, Jan Paul Dekker |
Slides Video |
Temporary: live endpoints: http://rc1-cix-ipv4.inex.ie/ http://rc1-cix-ipv6.inex.ie/ Web based consumer built-in looking glass Follow-up: https://lg.ecix.net |
| The remote peering Jedi | Code | Detecting remote peers at IXPs | Vasileios Giotsas, Petros Gigis, Alexandros Milolidakis, Eric Nguyen Duy, Marios Isaakidis, Edward Mukasa |
Slides Video |
Live data: peering portal |
| Peer Match-making | Code | Automate all the things! | Matthew Stone, Edward Medvedev | ||
| Summary | Robert Kisteleki, Vesna Manojlovic | Slides |
We are all Winners!
In the spirit of cooperation rather than competition, the jury decided that there was no single winning team. There were various awards granted:
- Pinder & Remote Peering Detection were presented at Connect-WG
- Universal Looking Glass & Remote Peering Jedi were presented at the RACI session
- One representative of the Remote Peering Jedi project team will be funded to attend the next RIPE meeting in order to continue work on this project
- The Bird's Eye team won the box of stroopwafels
Follow-up work will happen at the Euro-IX workshop in Krakow, 5 November 2016.
Future Plans
While in 2016 we had two successful hackathons next to RIPE meetings, in 2017 we will go back to having stand-alone events. Also, our topics will continue to be more various. So, instead of focusing on RIPE Atlas, we will incorporate more open data, such as real-time BGP routing information, or other areas that need attention, such as IPv6 tools, or improving protocol security.
The next event is tentatively planned already:
- Topic: DNS measurements
- Place: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Time: March or April 2017
- Days: Thursday & Friday
Please get in touch if you are interested in cooperating in this or one of the future hackathons!
All things hipster: barista, artisan pizza & craft beer
More Resources
Photos: Facebook group called "RIPE Hackers")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbxN5yKCBeA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFJ9-uLwIQ0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yawg2aRrrj8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bHWIzwu0No
360° view video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-1xQgOHZas
Related:
- On Tuesday, we had our 21st visit to the local hackerspace
-
Previous hackathons:
RIPE Atlas DataViz Hackathon Results
RIPE Atlas Tools Hackathon Results
RIPE Atlas Interface Hackathon Results
Stay in touch:
Comments 8
Comments are disabled on articles published more than a year ago. If you'd like to inform us of any issues, please reach out to us via the contact form here.
Serge •
What is a stroopwafel?
Hide replies
Mirjam Kühne •
Hi Serge, a stroopwafel is a typical Dutch caramel waffle. See here for a picture and some more information: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroopwafel
Hide replies
Carlos Friacas •
Serge: now you have been exposed :-) beware...
Blake Willis •
The RIPE Database is powered by Stroopwafels, similar to the way The Internet Generator runs on cats.
Vesna Manojlovic •
CAIDA wrote a blog post about the hackathon results: https://blog.caida.org/best_available_data/2016/11/11/the-remote-peering-jedi/
Hide replies
Vesna Manojlovic •
... and two more mentions: Euro-IX Newsletter http://us7.campaign-archive2.com/?u=99dcdddc67f83b726fa293b31&id=4dcbc6b909&e=c4430325ce & #37 Weekly Internet Infrastructure Updates from Christian Koch: http://us12.campaign-archive1.com/?u=d732e9c6adbea385abc856c8d&id=950ca992ef
sylow •
dear :how to use bgp rpki server?
Hide replies
Mirjam Kühne •
Sylow, can you please clarify your question. Is it related to the article above?