Three guys, a tank full of gas and a custom kegerator we made for the ForgeRock Technical UnSummit. Here is a brief synopsis of our trip to California to show off the newly completed NulliBrew 450 on which we had been working.
We arrived back from the ForgeRock Technical UnSummit in San Francisco in one piece. It was a whirlwind road trip from Calgary to San Francisco and back to Calgary again. We drove 4,900 km (3,060 mi) in just under 5 days. Some highlights from the trip home were a taqueria stop south of Redmond, CA; and some deep thoughts admiring Shasta while sipping coffee in the City of Mount Shasta.
We did a little shakedown sneak-a-peek of the NulliBrew 450 in the ForgeRock offices on the Tuesday before the conference. That went pretty well and allowed us to get some of the kinks out. We used Racer 5 IPA on tap which was delicious and poured really well.
The next AM we wheeled the NulliBrew 450 over to the Julia Morgan Ballroom for the main event. I expect in most cities you might get a sideways glance for wheeling a custom kegerator in an old server through downtown but I think in San Francisco that must be a somewhat regular occurrence. Here is it pictured below with the California St Cable Car in the background.
With the commute to the Julia Morgan over and NulliBrew ready to pour, we proceeded to have a great time at the UnSummit. Our goal was to have a little fun with the NulliBrew 450 and the social identity networking game we had crafted. The object of the game was to get people to earn points by connecting with one another and then be able to automatically pour beer with the NulliBrew 450 once they had earned enough points. All of the provisioning, authentication and authorization for the game would happen in the ForgeRock Platform coupled to Neo4j.
We started by registering attendees for the game in advance of the UnSummit by asking them to complete a survey of products and topics ranked in order of interest. On the day of the conference we provided registered attendees with an NFC token-keychain that was unique to them. In order for people to “connect” in the game they had to meet somebody else with a token and connect using an small Android app we had built just for the game.
The Android app showed an user their profile (name, points they had earned, who they should meet, etc.) when they badged their NFC token to the app. When both users badged they would have the option to click the connect button to try and form a connection. The users could connect if they weren’t already connected or they weren’t already in the same chain of the first user connecting.
We created a leaderboard using AngularJS and D3 so people could see how they were connecting. This proved to be very popular; folks would connect using the Android app and then check the leaderboard to see how/if the connection impacted the standings. The app performed queries against Neo4j and displayed the top performer in each category as a graph rather than just a data table.
Overall the conference was a great success with attendees suitably impressed with the creative efforts presented by the Nullibrew team. Now we have to go wire up the Raspberry Pi cluster, extract some data and see if any interesting social identity patterns emerge. We’ll keep you posted. Cheers!
