Open Hack - Volume #6

We celebrated our sixth Open Hack Day this year. For those that don’t know, 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.

This month, we had a lot of exciting projects come out of Open Hack. So without further ado, let’s introduce the results from this months Open Hack Day!

Tech Summary

This time we had 7 engineers, and 7 new technologies learned 📚

• noFlow (link)
• Electron (link)
• Unity (link)
• freee API (link)
• Barcelona (link)
• Cappuccino (link)
• puppeteer (link)

Project Highlights

@kefniark looked at noFlo, a flow-based programming language for JavaScript. His objective for Open Hack was to get the noFlo IDE running inside Electron. He was able to get a simple proof-of-concept app working on his local machine to manipulate files. He’s open sourced the code on his Github which can be found here.

@rramsden worked on a simple Cappuccino desktop application called Cappuccino Diff which reads diff files from a projects git repository. Using Electron he was able to package his small HTML5-based app for cross-platform distribution:

@miyazawa learned about the freee API. freee, is a Japaense HR and accounting cloud service.

@aminali inspired by a product he used many years ago built an app that allows people to anonymously suggest ideas in the company. The motivation is that in companies it is sometimes is impossible or too intimidating to suggest ideas to upper management or your boss depending on your position in the company or reputation. This means that seriously good ideas could be passed over. With this platform ideas are ranked by the company as a whole solely on merit. He released his project which is freely available and open source on his Github repo called innvo check it out!

@k2nr worked on Degica’s open-source PaaS Barcelona. He researched adding declarative environment variables which allow developers to easily add non-secret environment variables within their applications config files. A truly awesome feature for developers using Barcelona to speed-up configuring their applications.

@kajinor spent the day looking into the new Unity2D Features since he always wanted to take a look at them but never got the time for it until now!

@olingern looked at automating accounting processes at Degica using puppeteer, a library he was interested in learning about.

Pictures!

Demo Time - Me taking a picture telling engineers to look serious!

@kefniark doing a demo of his noFlo project

Summary

That concludes this months Open Hack. If you would like to participate we are hiring engineers! Head over to our jobs page if you’re interested in working at Degica.