Posted on 12/11/2025 • Hackathon
This hackathon surprised me as it was more development focused than I expected. I participated in this hackathon together with a friend of mine and we were tasked with making a podman container to host a website.
I never had worked with podman before neither had I ever made a container image from scratch so there was a lot for me to learn at this event.
Making this type of image for a container helped me learning more about containers in general and I found a new outlook on the applicability of containers for testing and production environments.
There were many struggles in the creation of this small project such as the time constraint while having to learn about how to set up the container, what base image to use for the container, what tools we had to install in the container and dependencies of these tools to name a few.
Another challenge we had to face since my teammate and I are both more focused on cybersecurity than development and it had been quite a while since we last had to actually code something.
The organizers for this event module were knowledgeable on making these containers providing me and my teammate with support whenever we asked for it.
A big selling point of this hackathon is that the building where the event happens is next to the zoo of Antwerp and we received free tickets to go in the park during our lunch break. It had been quite a while since I visited a zoo so this was a very positive point for the hackathon because it provides a way to recharge by taking a relaxed walk looking at different animals.
To conclude this article I’d like to reflect on the positives and negatives of this event. A big positive for me personally was that I was able to better myself in learning and testing new tools in a shorter timeframe by processing new material while testing the functionality. However a negative was that this was completely the opposite of what I like doing as an IT person, this was mainly because my expectations were more cybersecurity focused while the event itself is more development focused but who can blame me with a name like HackTheFuture. I am glad I participated despite all of this because it gave me a new outlook on containers.