PagerDuty Hacks: Alert by Foam Dart Bombardment

The Roman Pillar of Justice Hackday project at PagerDuty is a playful yet technically challenging integration involving a USB turret that fires foam darts at on-call engineers whenever there is a PagerDuty alert, with the additional feature of recording the event via a webcam. The project, designed to add humor and a sense of accountability, was developed using a Raspberry Pi, libusb for turret control, and a Heroku application to manage alerts and target coordinates, allowing for integration with other tools like Slack. The turret, humorously branded with the photo of a manager named Roman, could be operated remotely by any employee, adding an element of surprise and fun across the company. Despite occasional technical glitches, such as duplicate webhooks causing repeated firings, the project is regarded as a creative and entertaining addition to the company's internal hackday initiatives.