Need a last-minute costume idea for Halloween?
By Paria Rajai (Digital Marketing Consultant, Hackbright Academy)
This post originally appeared on the Hackbright Academy blog.
Meggie Mahnken and Katie Lefevre from the Hackbright education team add a tech-inspired twist to traditional costume ideas and help you really upgrade your soft… wear.
1. Angel Investor
Feeling angelic? Call on your inner businesswoman and go as an angel investor. All the startups will want to give you candy. Put on your best suit, add wings or a halo, and tack dollar bills into your pockets for maximum credibility.
2. RAM
Planning on going as a cute red devil? Put a technical spin on it. As we all know, the horns on the devil were inspired by the horns of a ram, so why not go as RAM? Paint a sheet of hobby board green, tack a sweet gold belt down the side for the contacts, and cut up some black foam to be your memory chips. Get some of those huge staples for miscellaneous soldered bits.
3. Net Neutrality
Hey Hippie Chick. Why not celebrate peace, love, and freedom this Halloween by going as Net Neutrality, man. But the Open Internet is really just a set of rules to abide by! Rules… not groovy… Against the Man… Tolerably groovy. Dress in your loudest flower child outfit, and if anyone tells you to tone it down, shout “HEY, NO CONTENT ACCESS THROTTLING.”
4. Password:123456
October is Cyber Security Awareness Month in the US (Woohoo! Who’s excited about that? We are!). Why not go as one of the 25 most common passwords of 2015? Some of our favorites: baseball, dragon, mustang, password, and the reigning champion, 123456. Write it big and bold on a sandwich board or do yourself up in LED rope for maximum visibility. If you catch someone blushing, maybe they’ll change their password. You’ll have done them a huge Halloween favor!
5. ConCATenate
We all know that dressing as a cat for Halloween is a timeless classic. Something that maybe NOT everyone knows is that cat is also a useful linux command that prints the contents of a file to the console. Hey, no one said you couldn’t be cute AND open source.
6. 404 Error
Perhaps you’ll want to go for something a bit spookier for 2015. Enter the grim reaper – a dark, hooded figure that’s sure to cast a dark shadow over anyone who dares come close. This is sounding more and more like the 404 Error, everyone’s least favorite status code. Throw a 404 on your cloak and you’re sure to insight fear and loathing wherever you go.
7. Ruby on Rails or Python
Return hack from our previous Halloween costume list! Hackbrighters Halloween costumes are always fun and programming languages do make repeat appearances. Check out Lisa on the right as Ruby on Rails (It says “Rails” on Lisa’s shoes) and Sanby is Python and Flask.
8. Ada Lovelace
Return hack from our previous Halloween costume list! Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of a Ada Lovelace costume. If you didn’t know who Ada Lovelace is, she is credited with being the “the world’s first computer programmer” – in fact, she was 100 years before her time!
9. Bonus Idea: Spiders
Spiders are a Halloween icon, but their internet namesake also known as web crawlers get little limelight. Instead of decorating those deliciously spooky Halloween cupcakes with spider web icing, draw this diagram of a web crawler.
And if you want to dress as something that’ll REALLY scare, how about going as the Patriarchy! Just kidding, that doesn’t scare us!
About the guest blogger: Paria Rajai (@pariarajai) leads marketing at Hackbright Academy. She is passionate about using the power of online and social media to accelerate change and has worked with the United Nations, Yahoo’s Business & Human Rights Program, VMware as well as other international nonprofits and tech companies to leverage new media. She has also been selected to be a member of the State Department’s TechWomen program, which aims to shape STEM policy and opportunities for women worldwide.
