A few months ago, my co-worker Tyler and I were discussing how it would be a lot of fun to host a game show to engage with an audience at a conference. We had both recently been watching a lot of “Um, Actually”, the premise of the show is that contestants are presented with a series of incorrect statements about various topics, which they have to buzz in and correct, to get points. We wondered if we could pull off doing something like that about OpenTelemetry.
The project being fairly large with many areas of specializations (specification, semantic conventions, implementations, otlp, opamp) is complex enough that we thought we’d be able to find some dark corners to make some interesting prompts. We submitted a proposal and once the talk was accepted we got to work. We had a concept, and contestants. Now all we needed were prompts, and of course buzzers. Well we didn’t really need buzzers, but I made it my side quest to make them happen.
The buzzers
I spent countless hours looking for buttons, boxes, speakers, and wires to assemble a workable buzzer. I connected it all to a pi-zero via a breadboard and wrote some python to make a game that would light up the buzzer, play a sound, and ensure a single buzzer could buzz at once. I couldn’t get the speaker and amp I purchased to produce any audio that sounded like the audio files I was sending it. I ended up switching to a raspberry pi 3 with an onboard 3.5 mm audio jack connected to an external speaker in the final product.
I ended up carrying all the gears with me, along with a portable monitor and a keyboard, in case I needed to troubleshoot the pi. A router, that I connected the pi to the morning of the presentation, 6am is an ideal time to refresh my memory about connecting Linux to a wifi router. I spent some time at the conference centre connecting the wires to the correct I/O ports on the breadboard. I really should have wired up some permanent connectors earlier on, but I only had so much time, If you’re interested in learning more about how everything on the buzzers worked, or what specific parts I used, reach out and I’ll happily write something.
The show
Many hours of preparations, and a few dry-runs later, the day of the show arrived. Leading up to the event, I was getting really excited about the opportunity to do this. Something about having the chance to share knowledge in front of a crowd, in a light hearted way had me pumped. The sillyness of it all, along with the fun I had preparing the buzzers, just made me appreciate how special this was.
Tyler had the wonderful idea to print the statements on cards for us to read. We had a couple of minutes between the previous presented and our show to get everything setup, thankfully the sound technician and event staff were super helpful. And then it was showtime (recording on youtube). The contestants were fantastic, the crowd was great, hopefully eveyrone learned a thing or two. I really hope to get a chance to do a second episode.
