Hackathon Day Three: Wednesday, June 4th

const metadata = ; After two intense days of deep focus and fast shipping, Day 3 gave us the chance to step back and recharge - not by slowing down, but by exploring the city that’s been hosting our hackathon: Nairobi 🇰🇪 1. A Morning in Nairobi We joined our local guide, Eric, for a walking tour through the heart of Nairobi. He and his team shared personal stories of Kenya’s fight for independence, introducing us to key historical figures like Jomo Kenyatta and Dedan Kimathi, and showing us the national monuments that appear on Kenyan currency. We then climbed to the rooftop of the Kenyatta International Conference Centre to catch sweeping views of Mount Kenya, Ngong Hills, and Nairobi National Park. It was a rare and energising way to take in the city from above. And perhaps most memorably - Vincent became a local celebrity for a few minutes, swarmed by excited schoolchildren eager to take photos with him. He handled it like a pro 😎 2. Back to Build Mode: Engineering Highlights Once we returned to HQ, the engineering team jumped back into action - and shipped some major improvements across the platform 🛠️ Onboarding Analytics A big shoutout to Isolde, who built a user activation funnel to track how users move through the Tracer onboarding flow. 🚀 This lets us: - See where users drop off - Identify friction points - Optimise the experience across environments and pipeline levels Cross-Platform Setup & Compatibility - Improved MacOS onboarding: Fixed .bashrc sourcing issues and updated Docker support for Apple Silicon (M1/M2) users. - EC2 deployment readiness: Verified that our minimal Docker example runs cleanly on fresh EC2 instances, with documentation updates to recommend appropriate instance types (c6, etc.) to avoid pipeline crashes. - Rust client update: - Added eBPF fallback, enabling Tracer to fall back to process polling when eBPF isn’t available (e.g., on macOS or inside Docker). - Verified successful tracing runs across ARM and x86_64 EC2 instances. > 💡 Demo dashboards for these test runs are now live on Grafana. Automated Process Matching Ashton also kicked off an exciting automation project to extract process definitions from Nextflow pipelines and auto-generate match patterns and labels 🤖 - Already created 54 match rules for the RNA-seq pipeline - Targeting over 1,000+ process rules across nf-core workflows With Nairobi as our backdrop and fresh energy from the morning’s adventure, the team pushed Tracer forward in meaningful ways - making it faster to adopt, more robust across platforms, and smarter about how users interact with it. Back to building! The Tracer Team