Another Belgian student event, this time Hack The Future, the Cronos-powered hackathon for IT and creative students. The 2025 edition ran on 12 and 13 November, and the theme was Aquatopia, which is also the name of the aquarium attraction at ZOO Antwerpen, where the event was held. The whole two days were built around that underwater motif, including a fairly memorable perk: a free ticket to walk through the zoo itself, which we could use whenever we wanted during the event.

The challenge: Deep Dive Linux

Each company at Hack The Future runs its own challenge, and the format gave us two challenges over the two days, one per day. The one I want to focus on here is the day we did Deep Dive Linux (repo by my teammate Waut Lornoy). The brief, in proper Aquatopia style, was "trek je duikpak aan en verken de diepzee van Linux", put on your diving suit and explore the deep sea of Linux. Each team got real server access and was expected to figure out a sensible direction themselves around automation, networking, and teamwork.

The starting kit pointed us at two things:

• A Containerfile for a simple web server, so we had something to actually deploy.
• Ansible playbooks meant to be driven from a bastion host, used to configure target machines remotely.

So the shape of the day was clear pretty quickly: get the container running, get Ansible pushing configuration from the bastion to the targets, and chain the two together into something that looked like a real deployment instead of "I ran it once on my laptop".

What we actually did

Day one was mostly the boring-but-necessary part: SSH keys, user setup, getting the bastion to talk to the workers, fixing the inventory file, and the usual "why is this playbook failing on exactly one host" detective work. Nothing glamorous, but it is the part you can only really learn by doing it on a server that is not yours.

Day two was where it started to feel like an actual deployment. We got the web server container built and pushed out across the targets through Ansible, so a single command on the bastion would bring the whole little fleet up. Not production-grade, not even close, but enough to feel the loop: write a play, run it, watch it apply across multiple hosts at once. That click of "oh, this is why people use IaC" is exactly the kind of thing a slide deck cannot give you.

The Aquatopia perk

The bit that genuinely caught me off guard: every participant got a free ticket to ZOO Antwerpen, valid for the whole event. Between sessions, or really whenever we felt like stepping away from the terminal, we could just walk straight into the zoo and Aquatopia. Wandering past lions and penguins on a break from staring at YAML is a strong way to keep your head fresh.

Small thing, but it is the kind of detail that makes an event stick. Most hackathons keep you nailed to a chair for the duration. This one had a zoo built into the breaks.

Takeaways

• Bastion + Ansible is a great teaching combo. You get the security shape (no direct SSH to workers) and the IaC shape (one place to push from) at the same time.
• Open-ended briefs force you to plan. "Figure out what you want to build" sounds nice until the clock is ticking. The teams who scoped down fast did the most.
• Show up to these things. Same lesson as every other event post on this site. Hack The Future was no exception.

Thanks to my teammate Waut Lornoy for keeping the Deep Dive Linux repo, to Cronos for organising the whole event.