Sometimes I like to think of OpenBSD development as a form of spiritual discipline.
The project is a decades-long painstaking labor of love with hackers carefully rearranging source code by hand.
In Dutch you'd call this monnikenwerk.
So what better place could there be for a hackathon than an actual monastery?
The g2k26 hackathon brought together 18 developers in the quaint village of Kloosterburen
(its namesake stemming from there being a monastery) in the province of Groningen and was funded by the OpenBSD Foundation.
I believe this was the first hackathon in the Netherlands!
It's like the monastics from way back when already knew what's up with creating the perfect environment for hacking.
We were given simple domestic quarters a stone's throw away from the communal hackroom.
Big windows provided views of the gardens to help contemplation.
While the Dutch national weather forecasting service issued its first-ever code red for extreme heat, our proximity to the North Sea and the monastery's thick stone walls created an enjoyable cooling effect.
This all allowed me to (surprise surprise!) focus on rpki-client(8).
A recent incident in the RPKI ecosystem helped me realize that our validator implementation doesn't need to try to synchronize to every broken endpoint on every run every time.
To improve reliablity and reduce pressure on affected publication points, I implemented a mechanism to carry some state from one run to the next run to instrument a backoff retry strategy.
Rpki-client now keeps track of the moment in time a RPKI CA became non-functional, how many synchronization attempts were made since then, and when the last attempt was.
With this information the program can progressively decrease the synchronization frequency for persistently non-functional CAs, eventually settling on retrying about once per day.
As they say: once bitten, twice shy.
In closing, getting to spend time with other developers really is lovely.
Special thanks to tb@ and claudio@ for their code review and feedback.
Shoutout to caspar@ for helping organize this hackathon!
