This year, I was lucky to be invited to the CloudFest Hackathon 2024, thanks to Carole Olinger, Alain Schlesser and Lucas Radke.
CloudFest Hackathon
11 projects competed this year and it was pretty hard to choose only one as there were loads of exciting challenges to overcome. We only have 2 full days (and nights) to code for the project we are part of and make history.
The projects were:
- Managing Multilingual Content with WP Multisite
- Public Sector Website Funding Transparency
- JSON Schema Field/Form Renderer
- CMS Health Checks
- Securing more infrastructure by easing OS upgrades
- Integrating MariaDB Catalogs with PHP Platforms
- Can everyone use _______?
- WordPress Tools for Hosting Providers
- Enable Mastodon Apps for WordPress and its Plugins
- Inclusive Language Checker for Open-Source Contributors
- Hack the Hackathon
I was on the fence for a while as I’m interested in Multilingual and Multisite, Inclusivity, JSON Schema, and MariaDB. Eventually, I took a chair at the JSON Schema table but quickly found it was too crowded already so I joined Integrating MariaDB Catalogs with PHP Platforms.
Integrating MariaDB Catalogs with PHP Platforms
The Team
We were very fortunate to work with Andrew Hutchings (aka Linux Jedi), who works for the MariaDB Foundation. The project this year revolves around the integration of a new feature called MariaDB Catalogs with PHP frameworks such as WordPress, Drupal, and others.
The team was therefore composed of:
- Project lead: Andrew Hutchings;
- Team members: David Beja, Alexander Gerber, Jan-Willem Oostendorp, Wesley Stessens, Marko Heijnen, Florian Blaser and yours truly.
The project: MariaDB catalogs
The general idea of catalogs is containerization inside MariaDB itself: you have one MariaDB instance running and every customer has their own catalog inside that instance. The memory is shared so you are saving a lot of RAM that way. You don’t have to have 50,000 different read DB instances running, each using a GB of RAM. You simply have one read DB instance running, but you still have each customer siloed.
The hackathon project is to make it easier to administer this, create and remove catalogs.