Rambler&Co First Hackathon

There was my first hackathon this weekend at Rambler&Co. Main subject was “Improve office life and development process”.

The most challenging thing is to come up with impressive and suitable idea, which will give employees comfort. List of projects as I remember them:

• Easy printing on different printers via telegram bot or web application
• Courses and educational events portal
• Collaborative food ordering
• Meeting room booking via telegram bot with Natural Language Processing
• Employees skills rating system with gamification
• Office navigation (yes, we have two buildings with 3 and 4 floors in them, and sometimes it’s hard to route from one point to another)
• App for event organization which helps you gather contacts from company’s internal portal, add them to group and discuss event (party, trip, work, etc).
• Internal bug tracker widget
• Automatic stage environment creation and deploying for QA

I’d been really impressed by range of ideas, and for some of them I’d like to come up with by myself.

For example, my favorite, the last one: Automatic stage environment creation.

It uses Docker, Etcd, Confd and Gitlab for orchestration and organization of staging environments automatically for each merge request. It is brilliant idea and even more brilliant implementation. Guys had their MVP ready in two days! I hope they will continue it and our development process will be even greater than now.

Our project was also great. It was about team event organization. Together with great frontend engineer we created web application built on Rails 5, PostgreSQL for backend, and ES6 vanilla, Webpack, Babel for frontend. We also used LDAP for authentication, Slack App API for event channel creation.