DevOps at TechX
TechX is student group that runs technology-related events on campus. With committees like THINK, we provide motivated high school students with the resources needed to make their innovative dreams a reality. With ProjX, we fund college students to pursue the wildest of ideas that come to mind. HackMIT & MakeMIT provide an incredible atmosphere for nurturing all sorts of ideas; while some founders have met at HackMIT, we also encourage taking on the silliest of ideas for personal growth. At our core, we’re a group of friends passionate about about doing things that impact our community.
DevOps fits into this picture by writing some software which helps all of these committees function; let’s take a look into the magic that goes on behind the scenes.
What is DevOps?
DevOps (short for “Developer Operations”) is the software development team that helps streamline TechX’s workflow. We love building things — when we’re not tooling away at problem sets, we’re probably working on various projects — TechX related or not.
We foster a culture of collaborative learning by holding Get Stuff Done nights (GSDs), where we order food and hack together. Members love these nights: it helps the less experienced learn from those with more experience and builds community.
Previous & Current Projects
Over the years, DevOps has made various projects (you can see the ones we’ve open-sourced here).
Quill
Registration, for hackers!
Developed by Edwin Zhang and open-sourced by Jessy Lin, Quill makes hackathon registration clean and streamlined. Organizers can manage registration and confirmation information, view registration statistics, and even integrate with Slack bots and other tools via an API.
Gavel
A few years ago, Anish Athalye realized that judging at most hackathons is broken.
Take the example of absolute scoring: let’s say one project will be rated a seven out of ten, and the other project will be rated an eight out of ten. Even with a rubric, the difference in assigning these scores may be quite arbitrary. Instead, Anish used a mathematically sound model based on the Crowd-BT algorithm, which uses pairwise comparisons.
Today, Gavel is used by quite a few hackathons, including HackPrinceton, WildHacks, HackTX, Hack In The North, HAkron, and HackBeanpot.
FAQBot
HackMIT gets a lot of emails, many of which may be answered by our FAQ. To help us answer these messages in a timely manner, Shreyas Kapur wrote a bot integrated with our Gmail to automate responses to select emails. With these templates, we can better serve hacker needs, as well as reduce our time spent on email.
GalleXy
One branch of TechX, ProjX, provides funding for MIT student projects every semester, and Angel Alvarez is working on an online platform for sharing such student projects. This platform, called GalleXy, is useful for finding data on past student projects, as well as tracking progress for the hundreds of student projects that TechX supports every year.
Cog
Cog provides a centralized interface for loaning out hardware, which will be used at HackMIT 2017 and MakeMIT 2018. It makes it easy for organizers to manage hardware inventory and track which hackers have what, and it allow hackers to quickly find the hardware they want for their hack. Cog is a work in progress that is expected to be open-sourced in early October.
Interested in more?
We’re always looking to build our next project: if you’re excited by building software to support teams, drop us a line at techx-devops@mit.edu! We’re happy to help.
If you’re a current or incoming MIT student (interested in DevOps or otherwise), keep an eye out for us at the Activities Midway! We’re always looking for new students to join.
A special thanks to TechX Exec, Anish, Shreyas, Claire, and various HackMIT members for giving feedback on this post.
