EL Hackathon: Two days of coding wild ideas

Every couple of months, we take a break from whatever we’re working on and for two full days we work on something different. Back in January we organized the first EL Hackathon in 2014. We continue with the same passion, and new wild shots.

Here are the projects that we made during our company EL Hackathon in March:

iBUZZ

The app is a quiz based on the popular PlayStation game Buzz. You can host a game on an iPhone and other iPhones can join the game. Meanwhile, host mirrors display over AirPlay device like AppleTV to big screen. On the screen the quiz displays current scoreboard, a question and 4 possible answers. On each iPhone device there are 4 buttons which match to the answers presented on the big screen. The user who has the fastest correct answer gets 10 points, next one 8 etc. [dribbble shot]

Online store template

Our designers were busy too. They created two layouts — for mobile and desktop, and a layout for the iPhone app. The emphasis is on good UX and a simple interface.

StandUp Mood

StandUp Mood is an app that will give you feedback about general atmosphere during your stand-up meetings. It uses face detection mechanism to recognize how many people are smiling in front of the camera. Then it calculates a value to boil it down to a single number. If this number goes down every few seconds then your stand-up meeting is not going well! Of course, if your team is laughing all the time then you might want to look into that too :)

EL Bets

The architecture of EL Bets is based on ideas and patterns exposed in ‘From ActiveRecord To Events’. Emanuele Delbono had a presentation about this at the Wrocloverb conference.

It is about Domain Driven Design, CQRS and Event Sourcing. Completely different approach to our day-to-day programming experience.

We started building a simple gambling service for baseball fans. The application stack is as follows:

Query part [reads]

• user interface — RoR
• Postgresql

Command part [writes]

• message queue — IronMQ
• events store — MongoDB
• domain model — PORO

The first working version will be delivered in a few weeks.

Dyslexo

Dyslexo is an improved version of the Squirt.io open source project. It aims to improve reading for dyslectics.

Couple of adjustments of the widget during EL Hackaton:

• Speed of reading (WPM) is saved between reading sessions. No need to set it every time the widget runs.
• Reading speed selections were lowered for convenience
• Rewind button rewinds 2 sentences instead of 10 seconds

Company dashboard on TV

This project aims to deliver a solution for displaying the company dashboard on TV. The display should turn on and off automatically. Chromecast is a great gadget but AFAIK needs sender or starting application manually. Sluggish Raspberry Pi looked like the best solution for our idea. The Raspbian turns on the Chromium Browser in kiosk mode, displaying our company dashboard. Token authentication to our dashboard was also added.

FormFiller

Fills web forms for you.

FormFiller allows you to fill web form fields via double mouse click or automatically. You just have to define values like logins, emails, passwords, etc. on the FormFiller configuration page.

That’s all. Hope you liked our hackathon projects. Watch this blog for upcoming EL Hackathon ideas!