Furby does Python
The soul of a furry machine: Scenes from a comedy hackathon
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“Can we mike the Furby?”
This question arose on a recent Sunday, as a group of five engineers rehearsed a presentation right before the grand finale of an event called Comedy Hack Day. Ludicrous? Trivial? Probably. But urgent, too.
To understand why, you have to rewind 48 hours or so, to the previous Friday night. That was when 100 or so engineers, designers, and comedians had first gathered to pitch dozens of project ideas in the corner of a co-working space called Parisoma in San Francisco’s South of Market district, as part of a humor-oriented hackathon.
That was also when the carefully laid plans of these five guys— friends who work together at a database startup called Memsql, and who had been planning for months to bring their project to fruition at Comedy Hack Day — nearly ran aground.
Their project: to hack the stuffing out of a Furby, transforming the novelty toy of yore into a wearable computing device powered by an open-source platform that responds to voice commands. They had programmed the furry blobule so that it would deliver their spiel for them to the Hack Day crowd. But its tinny words were inaudible from the stage, even to people sitting in the front.
So now, on Sunday — after they’d spent two days painstakingly disassembling the blue critter with the goggly eyes and the twitchy ears, hooking it up to an Android phone, building a Web-based interface to control it, and running wires up its back and into its guts — there was considerable pressure to make sure that the little fellow could be heard throughout the Mission District’s Brava Theater, where eight finalist projects would demo their work and one would emerge a winner.
This space was several times the size of Parisoma. It was going to fill up, soon, with a boisterous crowd. Furby was going to have to crank it up to 11. If anyone could figure out how to make that happen, it was this crew.
I first encountered them Friday evening after the pitch-session debacle. Here’s how Comedy Hack Day is supposed to work: After the pitches, developers, designers, and comedians spread out to form teams in a kind of cross between speed dating, course selection, and musical chairs. The whole event is like a mad chemistry experiment to see what sort of creative sparks might fly when you throw programmers together with comedians — “the two most awkward groups I know,” in the words of event impresario (and former Onion staffer) Craig Cannon.
Cannon and his colleagues — including another Onion alum, How To Be Black author Baratunde Thurston, and several other partners in an agency called Cultivated Wit — had provided small buttons for participants to wear to identify their skills. But hardly anyone wore the buttons. Instead, in a sort of social Brownian motion over the course of about an hour, participants milled and chatted and finally coalesced into small groups of three to six members gathered around folding tables. Surrounded by plastic beer cups, munchies, and laptops, they got down to work.
The Wearable Furby group skipped this whole process. They’d arrived together with their mission, first conceived by a skinny recent Stanford grad named Conor Doherty. (Not coincidentally, he’d been a winner in last year’s Comedy Hack Day in San Francisco as part of the team for “Citation Needed,” which lets you insert random BS into fake Wikipedia pages to win arguments.) As soon as the pitches concluded, they made a beeline for the glass-walled boardroom, spread out their tools on a conference table, and began the process of Furby dissection.
Responsibilities had already been divvied up: Joseph Victor would write the Python scripts that run the Furby’s (very) artificial intelligence, and also hook it up to @tiaraboom1, a Twitter bot he’d built. Neil Dahlke would create the Web front end for feeding lines to the Furby. Carl Sverre was going to build the backend system that tied together the user’s input with the scripts. (He also wore the Furby on his shoulder.) Hurshal Patel was the brave soul who would descend into the Furby’s innards with a soldering iron. Doherty, the team’s comic/geek double threat, would “bring the magic,” in Sverre’s words.
Hackathons have taken off over the past decade for any number of reasons. For tech workers, the allure of a what-the-hell attitude abetted by booze, burritos, and sleeping bags shouldn’t be underestimated. But the key selling point for hackathons is the short time-frame. In an industry where big projects routinely fall behind schedule and go on “death marches” to try to catch up, knowing that you only have a day or two to accomplish something can be an enormous relief. As Samuel Johnson said of the prospect of being hanged, it “concentrates the mind wonderfully.”
The concentrated minds of Comedy Hack Day produced their share of delights — like High Fyves, a “Lyft for high fives” that lets you summon a random stranger for some instant palm-to-palm action; near-misses — like Decoy Leroy, a race-based blamethrower that provides white users with “an auto-generated Black man” as a scapegoat; and duds — like Duolingus, a suite of web-based oral-sex training exercises with a vaguely feminist bent but way too heavy a hand. Some nailed the technical execution but flubbed the jokes (as with Amazon Automator, which populates your Amazon recommendation history with spooky items so that friends who borrow your account think you’re up to something criminal). Others put on a funny show but didn’t make clear exactly how their technology could ever work (like Good? Morning, which starts out as an alarm clock that blackmails you into waking up, asks you all sorts of personal questions, and then tells you, “Great, that’s the last thing we needed to put all your money in the Russian stock market”).
Cannon, Thurston, and company have pitched their event right on the unstable but fertile faultline between tech-product brainstorming and sketch comedy. Maybe Comedy Hack Day is just froth on the tide of tech dollars currently washing through the Bay Area. The world does not desperately need a programmable, wearable Furby. But programmers and product developers can always use new ways to move more quickly from idea to prototype. There’s also some sort of genuine alchemy at work today any time you can fill a medium-sized theater on a Sunday night with a diverse crowd of actual human people who (mostly) aren’t glued to their phones.
On Friday, as I ate dinner, I sat next to Derek Reynolds — a laid-back developer with shoulder-length blond hair and a David Foster Wallace look — and asked him why he’d come. Partly, he said, he was Cannon’s friend. But also, although he loved the hackathon idea, too many of the events promote an “unhealthy” environment that turns him off: stay up all night, eat junk food, get soused. Comedy Hack Day seemed more sensible. While spending the weekend creating his Punboard project with a couple of collaborators — it’s a leaderboard that lets you rate people’s puns on Twitter — Reynolds got most of a full night’s sleep. So did the Furby developers.
It turned out they could indeed mike the Furby: a run-of-the-mill lapel mike worked fine, even without a lapel. But just in case, they’d also modded the hairy homunculus, replacing its standard-issue audio with a Radio Shack Mini-Amp 277–1008C to make sure its gnomic utterances could be heard.
And so, when its moment in the spotlight arrived, the Furby’s voice rang out loud and clear. Asked to find a nearby Starbucks, it obliged with directions, but insisted that Philz — an independent local fave — “is better.” A couple of times, when its speech-recognition failed to understand a question, it paused and blurted, “Can I get a what-what?”
“That’s its 404 error message,” Doherty explained.
At the end of the show, three judges retreated offstage to pick a winner. The weekend had started with 50 pitches and narrowed to 15 completed projects, of which eight got to present on Sunday. The High Fyves gang had given the Furby guys a run for their money, theatrically: In their demo, a team member summoned by the app charged down the aisle and barrel-rolled onto the stage with a thud to deliver a resounding, exuberant slap.
But there really wasn’t much doubt who would take the prize. And when the Furby was showered with trophies, he didn’t make a sound.
