Introducing Open Hack Day 🛠

Being someone passionate about programming I have found most innovations in my career have come from projects outside of work. Whether it is research, or time spent working on a side-project, engineers need time to explore and discover.

Open Hack Day is an opportunity for Degica engineers to take a full day to work on any projects they want to, with absolutely no strings attached. The only requirement is that at the end of the day, each person gives a short (2-3 minute) summary of what they worked on, and what they learned.

Thus on December 13th the first “Open Hack Day” was celebrated. With 9 engineers in total we hacked and presented projects ranging from contributing to Open Source to building development tools to boost developer productivity.

With the pressure to “ship” something by the end of the day, the first Open Hack day was described as “super intense”. It was also very exciting for everyone, since it gave members a unique chance to work on personal projects with their teammates.

We saw a lot of interesting ideas come out of the event. Although not all of them were directly related to our day-to-day work, they were a great opportunity to learn and hack on something new.

Below are some the projects and research that made it out of our first day:

GraphQL + Komoju

By Kazunori Kajihiro (@k2nr)

Kajihiro-san introduced GraphQL to our payment service Komoju.

GraphQL has huge potential on our platform as a way of simplying API development. We’re now looking at releasing a GraphQL endpoint for Komoju later this year.

Rails Contributions

By Chris Salzberg (@shioyama)

Chris Salzberg spent the day refactoring a core part of the Rails framework based on his previous work on The Ruby Module Builder Pattern.

Cappuccino VSCode Extension

By Richard Ramsden (@rramsden)

The current IDE tools for Cappuccino were somewhat lacking and causing frustration in our development team. During Open Hack Day I decided to write my own IDE extension for VSCode.

I published and open sourced my own extension for Visual Studio Code.

Keisan

By Chris Locke (@project-eutopia)

Chris Locke took the time to work on a side-project he started last year called Keisan. Keisan is an open source project to parse math equations into an abstract syntax tree and evaluate the result.

Golang powered E-Commerce

By Taku Nakajima (@essa)

Nakajima-san explored E-Commerce solutions powered with Golang. He researched a number of Open Source projects:

• QOR - SDK for E-Commerce & CMS development, written in Go
• GoCommerce - A headless e-commerce for JAMstack sites
• Digota - Ecommerce microservice written in Golang
• CoreStore - A standard library for e-commerce

Summary

We saw some amazing projects and contributions come out of the first Open Hack Day that may of never come to light if engineers had not had a chance to pursue them.

With this success, we’ve decided to hold the event monthly at Degica. The next “Open Hack Day” is scheduled for January 25th – stay tuned for the next report! 😉