Physical Hack Day
The Introduction
The first spider.io hack day, led with diabolical cleverness by Dr Overell, produced our doomsday device.
For hack day 2, we decided to make the natural move from bits and bytes to yeast and spouts. We decided to build a bar in the office—with Octobeer: The GitHub Kegerator Project providing some early inspiration.
Arriving in the office in the early hours of the morning, Vegard took to the whiteboard wall like a Norwegian to a bonfire during midsummer madness, and led our brainstorming effort. The theme for the day: Grand Designs meets Scrapheap Challenge—construct a beautiful bar out of whatever materials are available to us. Vegard’s attempts at drawing parallels between software development and the hack day were met with suitable jeering and dismissive disdain (“blah, blah, blah…”, “Dude, we’re not in some kind of management consulting pep-talk situation here!”). Right, moving on swiftly then…
The Schedule
- 8am Brainstorm the design
- 9am Start Spotify Roulette
- 9am Start building
- 1pm Suitable hack-day lunch (Domino’s is quickly becoming a staple for this type of event—sensitive stomachs excluded)
- 6pm Aim to finish the building and pour our first ales
- 7pm Depart Spider Towers to the bowling venue
- 8.30pm Dinner—Steak
The Design
As one might expect, Spider Towers is not usually particularly well stocked with building materials, bar equipment or power tools, so some pre-planning was required. Wickes, eBay, Screwfix, Anagramltd.com and a1barstuff.co.uk were scoured beforehand for items that might come in handy. We’re quite sure the owners of the antique mahogany table were not expecting the table to be drilled and sawed, the extension turned into a beer engine cover and the legs to be turned into magnificent bar stools. However, despite the purchasing being done in advance, designing the bar was entirely left for the hack day.
Iterating and pivoting through several designs, we finally arrived at a design with two towers set symmetrically on top of the table, set on top of a hexagonal base (to maximise the storage space under the rounded table—thoughts of creating an oval base were quickly dismissed by our resident builder/designer/wood hacker). The base would feature doors on the back for easy access, and insulation to keep the pre-chilled ale cool for as long as possible.
Building the Bar
Three distinct tasks were identified:
- Build the base
- Create a tower to cover the beer engine and provide an anchor point for the lever action
- Adapt the table with suitable openings to accomodate the beer engine tower (the lager font is going to be made as part 2 of the project)
People gravitated towards their preferred job, teams formed and work began.
The Base
The Beer Tower
The Lunch
The Completion
The Enjoyment
