I work for Catalyst IT. A company that has built its reputation on Free/Libre Open Source Software.

Today is the second Catathon. A day where everyone, company wide, gets to take a day off at work and do anything they like. Literally anything.

We have people cooking, teaching latte art, hacking on emacs & vim, painting wargaming figures in Catalyst colours (which aren't bad for a sci-fi themed wargame), running a Catalyst themed bingo, there's a band. There's also a group working on a one-bit neural network. A whole bunch of people contributing to open source projects. After the recent bus change there's even a group building a Wellington transit reliability database...

My project is to get Function as a Service (FaaS) running on a Raspberry Pi.  Once that's working I'm going to experiment with querying a local Wikimedia site with the semantic mediawiki extension.  This basically turns a wiki into a database.

While the local testing will be to query the semantic wiki for the SLA status of clients I intend to use this to query Wikipedia for content on Messier Objects.  The vast bulk of these sites out there all look like they were scraped from the very first one built on Geocities in the early '90s...