On a beautiful spring morning a couple of months ago, I popped into my local branch of a certain red and yellow fast food chain, where they had a large “Employee of the Month” shrine prominently displayed for customers to see. I was so taken by the obvious passion and enthusiasm imbued in the graphic design of this employee appreciation altar, that I knew I had to craft my own respectful tribute.
On November 1st I was at the Watchful Halloween Hackathon, where it finally became a reality. An elite team of Corporate IT’s finest engineers was assembled to build the Employee Appreciator.
Behold, the Employee Appreciation Award:
Get Your Employee Appreciation Award Here#
The Tech#
The Appreciator was a fairly simple app to make with some LLM assistance. I built the backend which does the actual image generation, while my teammate built a frontend to make it self-service for our corporate employees. It took us a couple of hours to get an MVP rolling, then we spent the next few hours honing the look and design. Initially we went with a yellow and red simple fast food themed frontend. However, after several focus groups and consultation with the executive vice-president for human resources, we decided it would be more on-brand to make the tool look like an ancient .NET application that hadn’t been updated in 20 years.
The backend uses the Python image library Pillow to overlay text and images onto a base image. The frontend is running React and Next.JS. Between them is just an API where one image is uploaded and another is returned, which means I don’t need to store a bunch of random images from the public (yikes).
For deployment, I got Claude to write a Dockerfile and a Kubernetes manifest, and deployed it to my usual tinkerprod at Rackspace Spot.
Thanks Watchful!#
I want to thank the team at Watchful for putting on the Halloween Hackathon, especially Walter. Events like this always take more organising than you might expect, and there haven’t been as many in recent years, so it’s great to see them coming back. With the rise of LLM-based tools, they no longer have to be full-weekend events, as building prototypes is what LLMs tend to be best at.
