OpenPaaS’ Newsletter — August 2018
A focus on side-projects
Introduction
OpenPaaS’ developers and more generally LINAGORA’s employees are passionate and committed: they are working hard to ship better software, to exceed customer’s expectations and to seek new markets so that open source services and products can thrive.
This commitment does not only manifest throughout their job but also sometimes during their free time. It is the purpose of this newsletter to showcase some side-projects our team members and employees are involved in.
Making movies with Walid
Let’s start with Walid, a web developer who has joined the LinShare team a couple of months ago, after a successful training with OpenHackademy, LINAGORA’s initiative to help individuals acquire critical skills in information technology (Note: LinShare is LINAGORA’s secure file sharing solution). When Walid is not hacking into JavaScript and VueJS—his favorite framework so far — you could surely stumble across him filming and doing video montage, one of his other passion.
His favorite playfield? His hometown of Aulnay-sous-bois, a northeastern neighborhood of Paris located at around fifteen kilometers of the capital, where Keep Smile is born in 2015 — an association dedicated to teaching the art of filming, especially to local inhabitants — and which Walid joined in 2016. With eight members in the crew, with skills such as acting, photography, communication and video editing, they are trying to spread their passion, and successfully so, as they are about to organize the second edition of the Festival Hallnaywood, dedicated to short-movies, and which will take place September the 1st. Let wish them good success!
Resurrecting electronics with Alexandre
Darned it, that TV remote control’s led is not blinking anymore! What if I try to fix it rather than to throw it away?
According to Alexandre, support engineer for OBM — Open-PaaS’ predecessor—this decade-old event is the tipping point when his interest in electronics grew up to become a passion. He has then studied high-current electronics, but would ultimately focus on low-current electronics, as shown by the home-based smartphone repair shop he had once set up on his desk and used to ran after school.
His operation scaled up when he moved to a shared-flat and got more space. Here, his focus turned to two side-projects, both built around the now iconic Raspberry Pi computer. The first project was about home automation, and its goal was to allow the remote control of infrared-aware electrical switches via a web-server and some PHP codes; the other was about retro-gaming, and it consisted in building a video game arcade cabinet from scratch, powered by RetroPie, a popular cross-console and open source video game emulator. For the latter, he had to practice carpentry, a skill his grand-father taught him when he was a kid. Alexandre is now about to finish his first arcade and to start building a second one; he will also begin to restore a vintage radio and will power it with Volumio, an open source audiophile music player.
Sorry, he no longer accept orders. And yes, he got the TV remote control fixed.
How to make a lot of honey with Kevin
At the beginning of spring this year, when flowers started to blossom, Kevin — full stack software engineer working on LinShare — joined Happyculteur, a non-profit dedicated to raising awareness around bees, honey and their habitat in the Ile-de-France region. To achieve their intended goal, Happyculteur organizes beekeeper trainings and initiations, and help individuals install and maintain beehives, inside and outside of Paris.
How to help like-minded people better discover each other? Thanks to Kevin, the twelves members of this non-profit are now exploring a new avenue: to create a web application around a map, listing people with the same interest: make honey not money. This project is a great occasion to work on a purposeful project which represents the perfect playground to try new exciting tools and technologies, from cloud computing to serverless infrastructure. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to name all technologies involved as we don’t want to inadvertently trigger the buzzword detector or more seriously, advertise for those that don’t need it.
That being said, we can speak freely about the application itself, which is still in the early stages of its development. Let the sneak peek begins: the application is written in JavaScript, the language of choice for web applications; the power of typing is provided by TypeScript; the back end is powered by NodeJS and the front is made with React; for logging, Kevin relies on Sentry ; snyk is used to scan the code and look for vulnerabilities; finally, for the map, the open-source JavaScript library Leaflet has been chosen: a forward thinking technological stack indeed!
This stack and the freedom to make it evolve do constitute a wonderful playground to test new things and improve your skills while helping someone else; a perfect combo for me, and probably for you too!
Let us concludes with an announcement: Happyculteur is looking for new developers, willing to spend a few hours per months to help Kevin ship the web application. Please, do contact them if you are interested.
Conclusion
We hope you have enjoyed reading this newsletter. For those that were on holidays and are going back to work, we wish you the best!
Please keep in touch with OpenPaaS on Twitter, Facebook, GitHub.
Interested in joining LINAGORA? We are hiring!
