Greenhouse Hackday 2020
This year, Greenhouse hosted a hackday in June. Since this was during the pandemic in New York City, it was done completely remote. We formed teams and spent all of a Thursday Friday to work on a small project. Friday was spent finishing the project and creating video presentations to showcase the results to the rest of the company.
I’ve asked some who participated in the hackday to share their experiences.
GreenSpace
Hi my name is…
Mark McDonald
What was your project? Why did you pick that?
We called our team GreenSpace (Greenhouse meets Squarespace) and we created a new theme for our Job Boards. I picked it because I thought the projects sounded fun, valuable, and achievable — I also hadn’t worked with everyone who was interested in the idea.
What did you think of your team’s end result?
It’s great! Because we already support custom CSS for our job boards we were able to create a support article (requires being signed into greenhouse to view) with our theme attached. We were also able to add a few links to the article in the app (yay for quick CI/CD and feature flags).
I think the new theme has some great visual and UX improvements.
What were you proud of?
The team worked together really well and came up with some interesting workarounds as we ran into problems. We take backwards compatibility seriously so we restricted ourselves to only providing a new CSS file without any changes to the existing html. This meant we had to use CSS only when we wanted to reorder elements and make links wrap their sibling elements.
What was your favorite moment during the hackday?
All the Demos! Each team made a 5 minute video and everyone watched the playlist together on a zoom call. A lot of the videos cracked me up and it was great seeing the creative ideas everyone had.
Greenhouse Retro (RemoteRetro Improvements)
Hi my name is…
Eric Stolten
What was your project? Why did you pick that?
I hacked on the RemoteRetro tool. I wanted to hack on a new framework and make some changes that have been bugging my team.
What did you think of your team’s end result?
I got more done than I thought I was going to. I still have some work to do if I want to contribute changes back.
What were you proud of?
How quickly I was able to get up to speed with Phoenix/Elixir
What were you most surprised by when working on the project?
I was surprised at the developer experience with Phoenix. It rebuilds and reloads super fast. Changes are nearly immediate.
What was the most difficult part of your project?
Getting the project setup to start hacking on. There were instructions, but they weren’t as complete as they could have been.
What was your favorite moment during the hackday?
Seeing all the hard work put into other projects.
Who was on your team, and how was your team dynamic?
I was just a lonewolf
What will you do differently next year?
I’ll probably do something similar next year but put more time into my presentation.
In Conclusion…
I think having more than one day was beneficial. It allowed me to have a whole day and a little bit to really work on something and scope it correctly.
Stash
Hi my name is…
Tim Johnson
What was your project? Why did you pick that?
Sending frontend performance metrics to datadog via statsd. The datadog RUM product collects lots of frontend metrics, but there is no way to designate certain metrics for longer term storage (currently limited to 14 days). Also the RUM metric type is not as flexible as the statsd metrics for monitoring SLOs.
What did you think of your team’s end result?
It was a good proof of concept that showed we can fairly easily track our frontend SLOs.
What were you proud of?
I wrote the receiver in golang since it seemed like a prime use case for its concurrency and speed, while not having to dig deep into golang features..
What were you most surprised by when working on the project?
How easy it was to get running on golang especially with datadog statsd packages already existing for it.
What was the most difficult part of your project?
I didn’t run through any golang tutorials so I forgot that pointers were a thing, so I spent a good long time trying to understand why my code wasn’t working.
What was your favorite moment during the hackday?
The demo videos were all so good. It was fun when coworkers noticed the Phish easter eggs in my demo video.
Who was on your team, and how was your team dynamic?
It was me. It is very hard to work with myself.
What will you do differently next year?
Plan ahead and have a team. I had a lot going on so I wasn’t sure if I was going to get the time, or have the energy to participate in hack day this year.
In Conclusion…
Hackday was great as usual!
