Playlist "Gulaschprogrammiernacht 24"

Pixel Bureaucracy At The Scale Of Chaos - or: Torturing 286 People By Pretending To Be The Government

luap42 and 9hax (lydia!)

This talk could be described as "pixelebbe Wrapped", except that it is at a different time of the year, has better jokes, provides more technical and moral insights and is not personalized. So erm it probably isn't a "pixelebbe Wrapped" at all, but hey, learn how we built and hosted pixelebbe, achieved better uptime than GitHub and spent only a reasonable amount of effort on this shitpost-turned-project (that's what we tell ourselves at night).

In the history of human kind, there is a set of unfortunate innovations that have caused a lot of suffering and destroyed many lives. One might think of the nuclear bomb, or the internet. One could also think of pixelebbe. At least if one were to be untroubled by accusations of exaggeration and over-dramatising.

Well what is pixelebbe? It's a pixel-setting experience designed to frustrate the player using everyones' favorite thing: ✨ excessive bureaucracy ✨. The idea is very simple: we provide a 40x30 canvas, everyone can then tell us to set a specific pixel to a specific colour from our limited colourset, which we then do and so a picture will be created. Just add on top of that large amounts of red tape, such as limited office hours, a dedicated queueing system, having to use an official government form, very strict formality control and stamps.

In this talk, we want to lift the curtains and give a backoffice tour through pixelebbe. We'll talk about the technology abused to build and host pixelebbe, how we made professional software designed to look like it was put together in 2 hours. We'll even leak official secrets and risk going to pixeljail. There'll be time for a Q&A and a rare live-pixel-setting-session. Rumour has it, that even our agency lead might appear on stage, which had been notoriously always-absent during 39c3.

Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/