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The Stupid-Ideas Powershell Slackathon

powershell hackathon esoterica

I've been kicking around the idea of a Powershell Hackathon focused on "Dumb and Fun" ideas.

It's a hackathon — but globally distributed: people can't all get together in the one geographical location, so instead we'll use tools such as slack to meet up virtually and collaborate.

And it lasts for a short period of time, (24 hours? 72 hours?) during which participants are free to drop in (or out) as they please.

The ideas I've got for projects to work on are not as extreme (or funny) as the famous "Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon" though any ideas in that league would be more than welcome.

Solutions wouldn't strictly need to be pure powershell, they may include other technologies as needed. They should have some kind of powershell component.

Some Sample Ideas/Topics

  • "out-tshirt" - a cmdlet that directs your text/images to a custom t-shirt design website, and returns a url where that shirt can be purchased. e.g. "hello!" | out-shirt returns a url where you can buy a t-shirt with the word "hello!" on it. dir *.png | out-shirt returns urls to buy t-shirt for each of the pngs in the current folder.
  • A Chaos monkey! for the personal computer.
  • Text adventure games example
  • Video Games example
  • Turtle logo (see LeeHolmes/PowerShellLogo)
  • Fractals
  • Mandelbrot set (see Mandelbrot One-liner from WaiKin Wong)
  • Speech synthesis (see Give PowerShell a Voice Using The SpeechSynthesizer Class and Get installed voices, pranks)
  • Music synthesis Get your geek on with PowerShell and some music
  • IoT anything e.g.
  • Sudoku anything (e.g.)
  • Games anything
  • Azure anything
  • Choco anything
  • LinqPad anything (e.g.)
  • github anything
  • Fun with git hooks (or mercurial hooks) -- e.g., take a photo of the user's face at the moment a merge conflict is detected. play victorious music when a merge conflict is resolved, speak a phrase such as "here goes nothing" upon push.
  • bots anything
  • slack anything (post to slack from powershell)
  • trello anything (see Jeff Wouters TrellOps)
  • virtual reality powershell console.
  • Augmented reality anything
  • 3D printer anything
  • Auto-gui for any cmdlet
  • Powershell Artworks
  • Automatic podcast transcribing
  • A Powershell Web server
  • Unit test of regex
  • Visualize Powershell running tasks
  • Some ascii art related things
  • Cowsay (this already exists... but what else is needed in this category?)
  • A text only browser. A 2016 update to Lynx?
  • Powershell meets Electron
  • Spaced repetition fact tester
  • Profile gallery
  • Website to Customize and download a profile
  • Picture to ascii converter (e.g. Convert an Image File to ASCII Art Using Windows PowerShell)
  • Console based Twitter client
  • Content based RSS feed reader
  • Json to Jason converter.
  • Custom Formatter
  • Whacky Custom PS drives.
  • Node bindings: Powershell-to and from node.js
  • A terrible admin tool. How bad can it get?
  • powershell MVC
  • console based emoji support (see Emojis in Powershell? Yes!)
  • Tetris anything (see PowerShell Falling Blocks - Ascii art on the move)
  • boss mode
  • console based productivity tools. e.g. "block facebook/reddit for 3 hours."
  • a turn it off and turn it back on again script

Helpful people will be available to assist

Ideally, a couple of skilled powershell developers would be on hand to assist with your stupid ideas, and (or, worst case, to direct you to ask your questions on stack overflow)

Complementary Swag

It's traditional, apparently, to give complementary swag to all attendees and participants of a hackathon.

Stickers would be appropriate.

Prize Categories (for example)

  • Worst idea
  • Most interesting hack
  • So bad it's good!
  • Evil genius.
  • Worst Prompt Function
  • Best One Liner

Prizes include

I haven't organised anything here yet, though I'm sure people would be willing to donate prizes.

For example:

  • NimbleText Bundle license
  • Doug Finke's book (Windows Powershell for Developers, O'Reilly)
  • Lee Holmes' book (Windows PowerShell Cookbook, O'Reilly)
  • A coupon for my forthcoming book (Your First Product)
  • Other software, e.g. powershell related tools.
  • Other books, on the topic or off.
  • An amazon voucher (I would be happy to donate money to this)

When is it?

  • Some time in June 2016. And once a year every year after that.

How do I join?

To be a part of this epic event, simply put your name and email address into this form:

Alternatively you can:

  • Email me, leonbambrick@gmail.com, and I will invite you to the slack team.
  • Or send (@secretGeek) a direct message on twitter including your email address.

External Links

See Also