FreshHuddle: The first online edition
It felt like eternity! The last time we gathered around a group of passionate developers from the community was September. We had already called off two FreshHuddle events slated for Chennai and Berlin. Social distancing norms around the world threatened to keep our community apart longer than anyone could imagine. It was time for FreshHuddle to go where everyone is today — connecting and collaborating on the Internet.
Stay Home. Stay Connected. Stay Updated.
The theme for this first-ever online version of FreshHuddle was really a no-brainer. As responsible global citizens, we had to urge our community to stay safe indoors, while we collectively dive into some of the latest cool tools and features our engineers have been cooking. We also felt the strong urge to try and make up for the lack of human contact — missing in a webinar format and missing in our lives for the past several weeks — through some fun and games!
We also chose to go for a crisper yet wholesome agenda, packed into two half-days worth of sessions, hoping to learn what combination works best for this new format.
Day 1 — Announcements and Experiments
As developers filed in to the webinar, they were welcomed with some soothing music to replace the graveyard silence that would otherwise greet attendees — one of the many experiments our ever-curious Developer Advocates intended to carry out. I guess the experiment did go a little too far when pompous music celebrating one of the announcements decided it didn’t want to stop!
While we couldn’t see each other in person, an ice-breaker quiz was the best antidote to learn who is around and who has the fastest fingers. The quiz was intentionally lame — asking you about yourself — but the aliases participants chose were not.
With everyone now perked up, we dove into a traditional recap of what Freshworks has been brewing for the community in the last few months. There were several exciting announcements drawing virtual cheers from attendees, including:
- The launch of our online community at https://community.developers.freshworks.com 🎉
- A web component library, Freshworks-styled, that we can call our own. It also comes with a re-Fresh-ing name — Crayons! 🖍
- A test framework, based on Mocha, to write tests for your serverless apps (currently in BETA). ☕️
- Serverless apps for Freshchat, Freshcaller, and Freshteam. 🎁
- The official Freshworks AWS Eventbridge integration. 🙌
Now that excitement levels had been aroused, it was time to actually get one’s hands on one of these shiny new toys. Having just finished driving Crayons to launch, our lead front-end engineer Asif reeled us all in with hilarious memes that introduced the new component library before teaching us how to work with the components Crayons offered. At this point, it was time for another experiment! Glitch was unveiled to an unsuspecting audience, and very soon we witnessed what could only be described as magic! Four volunteers, randomly picked from the attendees, partnered with Asif in a collaborative coding exercise as they crafted a working app using the available components.
It was now Hem’s turn to follow up with another experiment — an interactive session that was part quiz, part solutioning exercise, 100% fun. Using inputs from the attendees, he shaped the solution for two complex problems that were to be solved using an app each. Participants were rewarded with points for choosing the right options. A rapid-fire quiz around numbers trivia topped it all off, with the winners standing to win goodies!
The final session of the day saw Rohith pitch opportunities around one of our fast-growing products — Freshcaller. With volunteers collaborating again on Glitch, a Freshcaller-Freshdesk integration was built and tested live on screen.
With the promise of another engaging half-day to follow, Day 1 came to a close.
Day 2 — Consolidation and Experience
Probably as a testament to the experience Day 1 delivered, nearly everyone turned up again for Day 2. We started again with a quiz — this time to check if folks were paying attention on Day 1! With the most attentive ones isolated as winners, it was time to dive into some testing.
Raghuram, a FreshHuddle fixture by now, was on tap to introduce the basics of unit testing in NodeJS using Mocha and Chai. Building on these concepts, he took our developers into a journey of using stubs and invocations to exercise the methods that comprise a serverless app.
Hem returned for a second salvo — this time to introduce the many, exciting capabilities now available to quickly build interactive app setup experiences without having to hand-code a complete HTML/JS module. Starting with new field types including api-key/domain and ending with callback support for each field that enables dynamic form rendering, developers were encouraged to stop using the iparam.html approach for building settings pages for their apps. Of course, both Raghu and Hem exploited Glitch to pull off some live testing and development again.
A light and breezy Minnal Talk from our community members hailing from Artissol helped wind up the sessions for the day. We learned how they cleverly weaved multiple APIs to send emails on behalf of a requester in Freshservice, and topped it with an even more intriguing interweaving of multiple platform features including data storage, recurring scheduled events, ttl to process changes for which no events were otherwise generated.
Until next time
The credits rolled as Saif thanked the community and requested their feedback so we could do this better and more often. We certainly had a great time putting this event together, and nervously watching it unravel without too many glitches — except the kind that felt like magic!
As the post-event survey results rolled in, you let us know in no uncertain terms that you enjoyed this format, found most of the sessions relevant and would love to join us again for another Huddle soon!
Our heartfelt ❤️ thanks to everyone who joined in and made this so engaging and fun. Here’s wishing our entire community, and their near-and-dear ones, a safe passage through this pandemic. 🙏
