October Hackday: iOS 8, Dev Docs ChatOps, and more
We love hackday here at PagerDuty – it’s a great opportunity for everyone at the company to work on projects they’re passionate about, get the creative juices flowing, and see how we can mix up the tools and technologies we know to help out our users and each other. Last month was one of PagerDuty’s most exciting hackdays, with a great mix of cool “What if?” projects, open source contributions, and little tools to help out around the office.
We’ve really been enjoying iOS 8 here, and love all the new APIs that came with it. Steve won our “Awesome” category with a proof of concept that uses the Yosemite/iOS8 “Handoff” feature to start incident response on an iPhone, then grab it where it left off on your Mac’s browser.
Also within the iOS 8 theme, Alper and Clay showed off a “Today” widget that lets iPhone users know when they’re on-call next:
We actually just got these two projects into our newest iOS build, so look out for an update on your phone and download the app if you don’t have it!
We also had some great dev-tool projects.
Grant, Amanda, and Greg have been giving our developer docs some much needed love. Greg gave them a spiffy new skin; Grant moved them behind Cloudflare (improving latency for our EU customers) and enabled HTTPS (security yay!); and Amanda started on moving them from a custom Rails app to a static Jekyll backend.
Even the fancy scheduling power of Google Calendar can’t fight Parkinson’s Law, so David Y wrote a bot to help us figure out what meeting rooms are free via HipChat.
Our new Sr. PM Chris, along with the UX team, wrote a flashcard deck for the spaced repetition system Anki to help new employees put faces to names.
Tim wrote a plugin for Lita (our ChatOps bot) that looks up common security vulnerabilities from different databases, so that we can quickly access this info and show it in our team HipChat rooms.
Finally, Shack put together a guide on how to set up custom Chrome Omnibox searches for internal resources. We’re loading this into our default machine images to help new employees find things.
And that’s the October 2014 Hackday! Want to participate in the next one? Come work with us 🙂