An impromptu side project
After several months of building msb.com (an interactive teaching tool for Kubernetes), we thought we’d put all the tech we’ve built out to good use and start creating some tech talks on Kubernetes.
To start off we thought we’d look through some existing tech talks and meetups to find an interesting use case. We vere wery surprised to find out finding these talks was fairly difficult and spread around multiple sources. Most of them were on youtube, but finding them was not easy since youtube search is not optimized for that.
What started off as an annoyance proved to be a good opportunity to build something fun for the whole team at msb.
Things escalated quickly
A message was sent in the evening to our backend team in Asia and things were off to the races.
What started out as a simple concept started to gain interest in the team, and pretty soon people were coming up with designs; discussions started on how we can use Telegram channels as a data source to rank the talks and calculating binominal proportion confidence intervals. It got to a point where we had to remind ourselves that, while it is a fun side project, it’s not our main business and we can’t devote too much time to it.
Our designer was happy to not think about Kubernetes objects for at least one day:
A huge surprise on the development side has been using Algolia. We haven’t used it before, and we have expected the integration to be simple, but they’ve made the whole process extremely simple, due to their Vue InstantSearch component library. We literally had the first version up and running in 15 minutes:
After a bit of polish, we’ve decided it was good enough, and we posted it online, and you can check it out at talktech.io:
It’s actually great to reflect on what can be built in a single day with modern technologies.
What we’ve learned
Overall building the project was a great experience. We think it was a great context switch for the team, after months of being singularly focused on building out the msb platform and working to get out of beta. There were a lot more ideas and ways to improve the product, but it was very important to timebox the whole process and keep in mind that the purpose was to be creative and have fun.
