Last week was awesome. On Friday, everyone got together for a company hackathon. There was paper, code, and food all over the place. We even had a delicious meal prepared by our guest Ben.
Hackathons are something we regularly do as an excuse to stop the madness of our daily work and take the time to explore concepts and bring new ideas to life. In this one, we decided to focus on existing Subvisual projects rather than starting something new.
For this weekly, I thought it would be interesting to showcase what we have been cooking:
Disturbance
Disturbance is a tool to balance the need for help with the need for concentration. We love to collaborate, it's how our best work comes to life, but spontaneously asking for help can break someone's focus and decrease their productivity. And the problem is that you never know when someone is available to be interrupted.
Here's where Disturbance comes in: it is a small application to allow each of us to show everyone else we're going into Do not disturb mode, to decrease the number of interruptions. We will talk about it in the future, but for now, it's under development.
BetterWriter
BetterWriter is for developers who are looking for a tool to write technical blog posts or documentation. When you're writing long documents, it gets hard to keep track of its structure. BetterWriter helps with a high-level overview of your document, allowing for simple navigation inside your document, taking special care of your code snippets. Since it was designed for developers, it also comes with useful integrations and keyboard support.
BetterWriter is a codename we are using, it doesn't have a proper name yet. Hopefully, we'll talk more about in the future.
Shelf
Shelf is an online library for organizations to keep track of their books and to generate discussions around knowledge.
It's a product we have been working on for a while, as we have detailed before. It is already online and usable, give it a try.
SmartOffice
This is an effort to automate our office. Part of this is Fernando's thesis, and he already wrote a weekly with his progress.
During the hackathon we built a tool that helps us know who is in the office at any given time. This locator is the foundation for the shenanigans we want to have in the office. Francisco came up with a [beautiful design] (https://dribbble.com/shots/2996924-At-the-office) for it!
Versominus
Have you tried Tetrominos yet? It's available for free on iOS and Android devices, and it's a puzzle video game we built and released a few months ago. Versominus is the next idea we had, turning Tetrominos into a multiplayer game that you can play on your TV (using the AirConsole platform), up to 4 players at a time! We can't wait to release this game (actually, we can't wait to play it ourselves!).
Project and People Management
This is more of a process than a tool. The purpose was to find a system to solve the problem of allocating people projects. The bigger the company, the harder and more important it is to do this right. We did a series of design thinking techniques to discover new approaches to solving the problem.
If you're interested in any of these projects leave a message. We'll talk more about them in the future, and hopefully you'll be able to try them all.
Last but not least, the usual, interesting content that we gather from all over the internet
Can we stop bad-mouthing CSS in developer talks, please?
The scientists who make apps addictive
Web development as a hack of hacks