In order to let the creativity to flow, we decided to organize an hackathon involving all the team. Nebulab believes in side projects, they help to form the junior members and grow the seniors, and put them in front of new challenges such as the exploration of fresh technologies.
But... what to do? Perhaps the embryonic idea was already present in the head of some of us...recently a recurring Slack topic is the future of the Spree platform, on which, essentially, all our projects are based and whose support had been declared abandoned by the original core team. This event resulted in the birth of a community for the development of a new ecommerce platform, Solidus, starting from a Spree fork. The discussions on the Solidus Slack channel have shown the need to quickly search and access the extensions developed for this new platform. Then it was a short step. A small webapp, easy to develop in a limited space of time, a Solidus extensions search tool using GitHub API. Given that everybody was interested in Javascript frameworks, the choice came down to Ember.js. Being known for a framework that increases developer productivity, we thought it would be great for a 1-day hackaton.
After a short but intense brain-storming on Ember.js structures and a coffee break, we started coding, dividing us in four groups.
- Communication with GitHub API
- Search Form
- Interface Design
- Frontend development
Taking inspiration from the biologic radar used in Metal Gear Solid , we named it Soliton and, once created the repository, the rule was: push on it as often as possible!
Referring to Ember.js Guides, we've easily built the frontend and backend application skeleton code while in parallel the style support tools were configured (with bourbon and neat as usual). In the meantime Davide, our designer, was free to imagine and draw the user interface.
A side-project carried out in the informal context of an hackathon day has, without any doubt, the positive side-effect to strengthen the union of the team, that by our nature can be distributed anywhere in the world. A great opportunity to work side by side and having a few laughs!
See y'all the next hackathon!
