Harry R. Schwartz

Every winter we have an annual hackathon at thoughtbot. We break into small teams, each of which spends a couple of days building a small product. It’s a chance to play around with new technology and to work on something that’s fun, but not (usually) essential. Last year, for example, I worked on setting a PGP keyserver on Neo4j, and the year before that we worked on a tool to automatically rebuild your CTAGS when files in the project directory changed.

This year my team decided to do something a little different and build a physical thing, and we ended up picking a gong. We found a gong (at a little music store way up in Acton), got some lumber, cut it, stained it, and glued and screwed it together. Then we stuck a vinyl cutout of Ralph on it, and boom! Gong!