This past year I have worked a lot with AWS on Research and my summer internship, but I haven’t had much of a chance to really just play around with it.

So, I decided it would be really cool to not only “draw” on the Github Contribution Calendar, but to simulate Conways Game of Life.

The AWS “Architecture” behind this is actually super simple, as it is powered by AWS Chalice, I really didn’t have to do much AWS wise.

For this project, I have two Lambdas ran on Cloudwatch Scheduled events.

The best part of this, is it has cost me $0 so far thanks to AWS free tier :)

Game of Life Handler

I initially started with this one handler, which runs code to play game of life.

It stores persistant/changing variables (board, daycount, github api key,…) in System’s manager Parameter store.

Every day, it runs one pixel of a 7x4 board. After 28 days, the game ‘ticks’ and the board is updated.

The goal is to run this guy in my contribution calendar:

Screenshot for readme

After finishing, i noticed how cool I thought the project was, but how boring the readme looked. Because of this, I decided to update the screenshot every day using selenium and posting it to AWS S3, where it has Cache-Control tags to invalidate after a day.

Here is the screenshot from today!

Source code

Here is the repo!